Bill to ban TikTok advances in US Congress

A bill that could lead to the Total ban on the hugely popular TikTok app in the United States adopted this Wednesday a milestone of the Congress.

The text, presented by a Republican lawmaker, would give authority to the president Joe Biden to completely ban TikTok, a subsidiary of the Chinese group ByteDance.

The powerful House Foreign Affairs Committee approved it Wednesday morning thanks to Republican votes alone.

Many U.S. lawmakers view the short-form video platform as a national security threat.

They fear, like a growing number of Western governments, that Beijing can access user data across the world through this app, which TikTok has denied for years.

“Make no mistake about it, TikTok is a real security threat,” the Republican warned Michael McCaulauthor of the bill.

“Anyone who downloaded TikTok onto their device offered the Chinese Communist Party a backdoor to all of their personal information,” he said in a statement.

Banning the application would be equivalent to “muzzling freedom of expression” of millions of Americans, protested TikTok, which claims to have more than 100 million users in the United States.

To be adopted, the text must now be voted on during a plenary session of the House of Representatives and then by the Senate.

Democratic President Joe Biden has the option to veto it.

The White House said Monday it was giving U.S. federal agencies 30 days to delete TikTok of all government-issued mobile devices.

Congress, the White House, the US military and more than half of US states had already banned TikTok amid fears that its parent company, ByteDance, is providing user data, such as browsing history and location, to the Chinese government, or spearheading propaganda and disinformation on its behalf.

The executive power of theto the European Union temporarily banned TikTok on employee phones, and Denmark and Canada announced efforts to block TikTok on government-issued phones.

China says the bans reveal America’s insecurities and are an abuse of state power. But they come at a time when Western tech companies, includings Airbnb, Yahoo and LinkedIn have left China or have reduced their operations there due to Beijing’s strict privacy law which specifies how companies can collect and store data.

The FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that ByteDance could share TikTok user data with China’s authoritarian government.

A law implemented by China in 2017 obliges companies to provide the government with any personal information relevant to the country’s national security. There is no evidence that TikTok transmitted such data, but fears abound due to the large amount of user data it collects.

(With information from AFP and AP)

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