House Republicans Wednesday voted to advance a bill that would authorize President Joe Biden to ban TikTok nationwide.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee voted 24-16 along party lines to advance the Deterring America’s Technology Adversaries Act, or DATA Act. The bill — introduced by committee chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas — would allow Biden to enact nationwide bans on software applications that are deemed a national security threat. Republicans have been especially critical of TikTok, owned by Beijing-based Bytedance.
“TikTok is a modern day Trojan Horse of the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), used to surveil and exploit Americans’ personal information,” McCaul said Tuesday during the committee’s lengthy discussion of the bill. “This legislation is the first step in protecting Americans against subversive data collection”
The Biden administration and lawmakers in both parties have expressed concern that TikTok could allow the Chinese Communist Party to gather information about American customers or that it could be used to spread misinformation.
Though some Democrats have expressed similar concerns about the social media app’s national security implications, the party’s top committee member, New York Rep. Gregory Meeks, “forcefully and unequivocally” opposed the measure, calling it too broad and “unvetted.”
“We could have held hearings before the markup and carefully crafted bipartisan legislation together,” Meeks said Tuesday. “Instead, my staff and I received the text of this legislation a little over a week ago, and have only had several days to review a bill that would dramatically rewrite the rules-based international economic order.”
Still, Meeks indicated that Democrats would not oppose all measures against TikTok, saying the country “needs to address TikTok” but that the specific bill “bites off more than it can chew.”
The bill’s advancement comes days after the White House moved to ban TikTok from all government-issued devices, giving federal agencies 30 days to delete the app.
TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter said Monday that banning the app is “little more than political theater.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning alleged Tuesday that the U.S. government is “over-stretching the concept of national security and abusing state power to suppress foreign companies.”
Given the partisan divide on the bill, it still has a long way to go before it becomes law. The GOP-led House would have to approve it and then send it on to the Democratic-led Senate. Biden also could decide to veto it.
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