Legislation to limit the use of TikTok in the United States will be put to a vote this month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee announced in January.
The chairman of the committee, Republican Representative Michael McCaul, is developing legislation that would give the White House the power to put a ban on TikTok owing to potential dangers to American national security.
The concern is that this application gives the Chinese government a back door into our phones, according to McCaul, which was the source of the initial information of the vote’s time.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump attempted to prevent the downloads of TikTok by new users and other transactions that would have effectively outlawed the usage of the app in the United States, but he lost multiple legal battles over the idea.
The Biden administration formally abandoned that project in June 2021. Then, in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio put forth legislation that would outlaw TikTok and forbid doing business with social media companies with Chinese or Russian roots or that are under their influence.
But since it would take 60 votes in the Senate to pass a ban on the popular short video app owned by ByteDance, doing so would be very challenging. In an effort to ensure Washington that the personal information of Americans cannot be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party or anybody else under Beijing’s control, TikTok, which has more than 100 million US users, has been working on this for three years.
TikTok claimed on Friday that calls for a total ban on the app “take a fragmented approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry problems like data security, privacy, and online risks.”
Biden signed a bill last month that prohibited federal employees from using government-owned technology to view or download TikTok. Use of TikTok on government-owned equipment is also forbidden in more than 25 US states.
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