TikTok Will be Blocked in the U.S. Next Month, the House Panel Committee Confirmed

(CTN News) – The House Foreign Affairs Committee said on Friday that it would vote next month on legislation intended to restrict the use of TikTok, a well-known social media app in China, in the United States.

Republican Representative Michael McCaul, the panel’s head, is drafting a bill that would provide the White House the authority to impose a ban on TikTok due to potential threats to American national security.

Bloomberg News, which first reported the time of the vote, quoted McCaul as saying, “The issue is that this program offers the Chinese government a back entrance into our phones.”

Donald Trump, president at the time, tried to prohibit new users from installing TikTok in 2020 and to forbid other transactions that would have essentially banned the use of the app in the United States, but he lost many court cases over the proposal.

In June 2021, the Biden administration officially gave up on the initiative. Then, in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio proposed legislation that would ban TikTok and stop any business dealings with social media firms based in or controlled by China and Russia.

But passing a ban on the ByteDance-owned short video app, which is well-liked by teenagers, would be very difficult, as it would need 60 votes in the Senate.

TikTok, with more than 100 million U.S. users

TikTok, which has more than 100 million U.S. users, has been attempting for three years to reassure Washington that the personal information of American people cannot be accessible by the Chinese Communist Party or anyone else under the control of Beijing its content cannot be altered.

Calls for a complete ban on TikTok, according to the company, “take a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry concerns like data security, privacy, and online hazards,” TikTok said on Friday.

Due to concerns that U.S. user data would be given to China’s government, the strong national security committee known as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) ordered ByteDance to sell its TikTok shares in 2020.

Since 2021, CFIUS and TikTok have been negotiating to come to a national security agreement to safeguard the data of American TikTok users.

According to TikTok, it has spent around $1.5 billion on these initiatives and has a “comprehensive set of procedures with layers of government and independent scrutiny to guarantee that there are no backdoors into TikTok that might be exploited to control the site.”

Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary for the White House, refrained from commenting on the law on Friday. I won’t get into specifics on it since (CFIUS) is still reviewing it, Jean-Pierre added.

A law that forbade federal workers from accessing or downloading TikTok on equipment controlled by the government was signed by Biden last month. TikTok use on equipment controlled by the government is likewise prohibited in more than 25 US states.

Related CTN News:

U.S. Senator Josh Hawley Wants to Ban TikTok in U.S.