The US House Of Representatives Foreign Committee Is Planning A Voting Title To Block TikTok Usage

Chairman of the Representative panel Michael McCaul, a Republican. (photo: @RepMcCaul)

JAKARTA - The US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee plans to hold a vote next month on a bill aimed at blocking the use of China's popular social media app, TikTok, in the United States, the committee confirmed on Friday, January 27.

The move, planned by chair of the Representative panel Michael McCaul, a Republican, aims to provide the White House with legal tools to ban TikTok due to US national security concerns.

"The concern is that this app gives the Chinese government a backdoor to our phones," McCaul told Bloomberg News.

In 2020, then President Donald Trump has also tried to block new users from downloading TikTok and banned other transactions that would effectively block the use of apps in the United States. But he lost in a series of court battles over the action.

Joe Biden's administration in June 2021 even officially canceled the effort. Then in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio launched a bipartisan law to ban TikTok, which would also block all transactions from any social media company under the influence of China and Russia.

But the ban on short video apps, which ByteDance has and is popular with teens, will face significant hurdles in Congress to pass, and will require 60 votes in the Senate.

For three years, TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US, has tried to convince Washington that US citizen personal data is inaccessible and its content cannot be manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party or anyone under Beijing's influence.

TikTok said last Friday, "the call for a total ban on TikTok is taking a little by little for national security and a little approximation to broad industrial issues such as data security, privacy and online hazards."

The US government's Foreign Investment Committee (CFIUS), a strong national security agency, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok due to concerns that US user data could be forwarded to the Chinese government.

CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks since 2021, aiming to reach a national security deal to protect TikTok user data in the US.

TikTok says it has a "comprehensive package of action with a government layer and independent oversight to ensure that there is no back-to-back path to TikTok that can be used to manipulate the platform" and invest around $1.5 billion to date. for the effort.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment on the bill on Friday. "This is being reviewed by (CFIUS) so I won't go into details," Jean-Pierre said.

Last month, Biden signed a law that included a ban on federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices. More than 25 US states have also banned the use of TikTok on state-owned devices.