The House Foreign Affairs Committee advanced a bill on Wednesday that moves towards being able to ban TikTok.
The social media platform’s parent company, ByteDance, has ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul on Friday, HR 1153 would revise legal protections that have shielded TikTok from US sanctions and prohibit Americans from engaging with entities that may transfer sensitive personal data to a foreign entity “subject to the influence of China.”
The committee voted 24-16 along party lines.
Now, the legislation will head to the House. If passed there, it would move to the Senate, then Joe Biden for a signature.
TikTok has released a statement denying that the app is a national security threat.
“A U.S. ban on TikTok is a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide. We’re disappointed to see this rushed piece of legislation move forward, despite its considerable negative impact on the free speech rights of millions of Americans who use and love TikTok,” said TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter in a statement.
Former President Donald Trump had attempted to ban TikTok while he was in office in 2020 but was blocked. Many politicians, including Democrats, have now said he was correct.
Democrat Sen. Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, admitted Trump was right during a November appearance on Fox News Sunday.
The senator told host Shannon Bream, “as painful as it is for me to say, if Donald Trump was right and we could’ve taken action then, that’d have been a heckuva lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022.”
Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner on TikTok: “I think Donald Trump was right. TikTok is an enormous threat.” pic.twitter.com/8g2fRwxrF7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 20, 2022
“Did Washington simply not listen because they didn’t like the messenger then and what can we do now?” Bream asked.
“Well, I think Donald Trump was right,” Warner said. “I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat.”
Warner explained that TikTok is “a massive collector of information,” including from children.
“So if you’re a parent and you got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned,” Warner said. “All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
Last year, the commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission urged Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores over an “unacceptable national security risk.” In a letter on June 24, he wrote to Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook and Alphabet Inc. and Google LLC CEO Sundar Pichai about how the app is a “sophisticated surveillance tool.”
“TikTok is not what it appears to be on the surface. It is not just an app for sharing funning videos or memes. That’s the sheep’s clothing,” Carr asserted in the letter. “At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of personal and sensitive data.”
TikTok doesn’t just see its users dance videos.
It collects search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, biometric identifiers, draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the text, images, and videos that are stored on a device’s clipboard. pic.twitter.com/GKheArMM5X
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 28, 2022
In a Twitter thread explaining the reason for his request, Carr wrote, “TikTok doesn’t just see its users dance videos. It collects search and browsing histories, keystroke patterns, biometric identifiers, draft messages and metadata, plus it has collected the text, images, and videos that are stored on a device’s clipboard.”
Numerous provisions of Apple’s & Google’s policies are relevant to TikTok’s pattern of surreptitious data harvesting—a pattern that runs contrary to its public representations.
And there’s plenty of precedent for holding TikTok accountable by booting it from these app stores. pic.twitter.com/QH1w4ERDdb
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) June 29, 2022
“Tiktok’s pattern of misrepresentations coupled with its ownership by an entity beholden to the CCP has resulted in U.S. military branches and national security agencies banning it from government devices,” Carr continued. “Bipartisan leaders in both the Senate and House have flagged concerns.”
The post House Foreign Affairs Committee Advances Bill to Ban TikTok appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.