The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to vote on a bill in February aimed at blocking the short video service TikTok in the country.
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The bill would give the White House legal authority to ban TikTok in the US on national security grounds. “There are fears that this application is a backdoor for the Chinese government in our phones”– Quotes Reuters Committee Chairman Michael McCaul.
Former US President Donald Trump tried to block the platform, but his decisions were overturned in court and the successor administration eventually covered up the initiative. Blocking the app, which is hugely popular among teenagers, at the legislative level will not be easy – serious obstacles are expected in both houses of Congress.
TikTok’s American audience is 100 million people, and for three years the platform’s administration has been actively trying to convince Washington that it does not have access to the personal data of US citizens and that Beijing cannot tamper with the content of the service. The social network claims to have spent $1.5 billion on development “a comprehensive set of measures, including government and independent oversight, to ensure TikTok has no backdoors to manipulate the platform”.
However, the app can no longer be installed on devices by US federal agencies – similar decisions have already been made in more than half of the states.
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