US Panel to Vote on TikTok Ban Over National Security Concerns in February

The Home Overseas Affairs Committee plans to carry a vote subsequent month on a invoice geared toward blocking using China’s widespread social media app TikTok in the US, the committee confirmed on Friday.

The measure, deliberate by the panel’s chair Consultant Michael McCaul, a Republican, would goal to present the White Home the authorized instruments to ban TikTok over US nationwide safety issues.

“The priority is that this app offers the Chinese language authorities a again door into our telephones,” McCaul informed 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 in the US, however misplaced a sequence 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 underneath the affect of China and Russia.

However 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 3 years, TikTok – which has greater than 100 million US customers – has been searching for to guarantee Washington that the non-public information of US residents can’t be accessed and its content material can’t be manipulated by China’s Communist Social gathering or anybody else underneath Beijing’s affect.

TikTok mentioned Friday “requires whole bans of TikTok take a piecemeal method to nationwide safety and a piecemeal method to broad business points like information safety, privateness, and on-line harms.”

The US authorities’s Committee on Overseas Funding in the US (CFIUS), a strong 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 succeed in a nationwide safety settlement to guard the information of US TikTok customers.

TikTok mentioned it had a “complete bundle of measures with layers of presidency and impartial oversight to make sure that there aren’t any backdoors into TikTok that could possibly be used to control the platform” and invested roughly $1.5 billion (roughly Rs. 12,300 crore) so far on these efforts.

White Home press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to touch upon the invoice on Friday. “It is underneath overview by (CFIUS) so I’m simply not going to get into particulars on that,” Jean-Pierre mentioned.

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

© Thomson Reuters 2023