The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to hold a vote next month on a bill aimed at blocking the use of popular Chinese social media app TikTok in the United States, the committee confirmed on Friday.
The measure, drafted by the panel’s chairman Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican, would aim to give the White House a legal tool to ban TikTok because of US national security concerns.
“The concern is that this app gives the Chinese government a back door into our phones,” McCaul told Bloomberg News, which reported the timing of the vote earlier.
In 2020, President Donald Trump at the time tried to prevent new users from downloading TikTok and ban other transactions that would effectively block the use of the application in the United States, but lost several court battles over the measure.
The Biden administration in June 2021 officially rejected the effort. Then in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio announced bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok, which would also block all transactions from social media companies in or under the influence of China and Russia.
But the ban of the short video app, which is owned by ByteDance and popular among teenagers, will face significant hurdles in Congress to pass, and requires 60 votes in the Senate.
For three years, TikTok – which has more than 100 million US users – has sought to assure Washington that the personal data of US citizens cannot be accessed and that its content cannot be manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party or others influenced by Beijing.
TikTok said on Friday that “calling for a total ban on TikTok takes a low approach to national security and a low approach to industry issues such as data security, privacy, and online harm.”
The US Government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok over fears that US user data could be sent to the Chinese government.
CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks since 2021, with the goal of reaching a national security agreement to protect the data of US TikTok users.
TikTok says it has a “comprehensive package of measures with layers of governance and independent oversight to ensure that there are no backdoors into TikTok that can be used to manipulate the platform” and has invested approximately $1.5 billion so far in these efforts.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on the bill on Friday. “It’s under review by (CFIUS) so I won’t know about it,” Jean-Pierre said.
Last month, Biden signed legislation that included a ban on federal employees using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices. More than 25 US states have also banned the use of TikTok on state-owned devices.
Source: Reuters
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