US Panel to Vote on TikTok Ban Over Nationwide Safety Issues in February

The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to carry a vote subsequent month on a invoice aimed toward blocking using China’s widespread social media app TikTok within the United States, the committee confirmed on Friday.

The measure, deliberate by the panel’s chair Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican, would purpose to present the White House the authorized instruments to ban TikTok over US nationwide safety considerations.

“The concern is that this app gives the Chinese government a back door into our phones,” McCaul instructed Bloomberg News, which reported the vote timing earlier.

In 2020, then-President Donald Trump tried to dam new customers from downloading TikTok and ban different transactions that will have successfully blocked the app’s use within the United States, however misplaced a collection of court docket battles over the measure.

The Biden administration in June 2021 formally deserted that effort. Then in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio unveiled bipartisan laws to ban TikTok, which might additionally block all transactions from any social media firm in or beneath the affect of China and Russia.

But a ban of the brief video app, which is owned by ByteDance and is widespread amongst teenagers, would face vital hurdles in Congress to go, and would want 60 votes within the Senate.

For three years, TikTok – which has greater than 100 million US customers – has been in search of to guarantee Washington that the private information of US residents can’t be accessed and its content material can’t be manipulated by China’s Communist Party or anybody else beneath Beijing’s affect.

TikTok mentioned Friday “calls for total bans of TikTok take a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms.”

The US authorities’s Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States (CFIUS), a robust nationwide safety physique, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok due to fears that US person information could possibly be handed on to China’s authorities.

CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks since 2021, aiming to achieve a nationwide safety settlement to guard the info of US TikTok customers.

TikTok mentioned it had a “comprehensive package of measures with layers of government and independent oversight to ensure that there are no backdoors into TikTok that could be used to manipulate the platform” and invested roughly $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 12,300 crore) to this point on these efforts.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to touch upon the invoice on Friday. “It’s under review by (CFIUS) so I am just not going to get into details on that,” Jean-Pierre mentioned.

Last month, Biden signed laws that included a ban on federal workers utilizing or downloading TikTok on government-owned gadgets. More than 25 US states have additionally banned using TikTok on state-owned gadgets.

© Thomson Reuters 2023