A bill likely to cause the total ban of the popular Chinese application TikTok in the United States today entered a key stage in Congress, amid complaints about its alleged use
for espionage that China
and the social network itself reject.
Tiktok is one of the largest social networks in the world, with
more than 1 billion monthly active users
.
As of January 2023, TikTok reaches 20.4% of the world's 18+ internet users.
Its owner is the Chinese company ByteDance The text, presented by a Republican legislator, would give President Joe Biden the authority to completely ban the app, a subsidiary of the
ByteDance
group .
The powerful Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives approved it on Wednesday morning thanks solely to the votes of the Republicans.
"Make no mistake, TikTok is a real threat to the security" of the country, warned Republican Michael McCaul, author of the bill.
"Anyone who has downloaded TikTok on their device has offered the Chinese
Communist Party
a back door to all their personal information," he said in a statement quoted by the AFP news agency.
Controversy: the app's response.
American representatives presented the project in a special committee.
Photo Bloomberg
Banning the app would amount to "gagging the free speech" 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,
and if approved, it is still up to Biden to make use of the option to veto it.
Many lawmakers view the short-form video platform as a threat to national security.
They fear, along with a growing number of Western governments, that China could access user data around the world through this app, something TikTok has denied for years.
Yesterday, the United States, Canada and Denmark resolved to remove the device from cell phones belonging to government or parliamentary personnel for security reasons due to allegations of espionage, which for Beijing constitutes an "abuse of state power.
"
The official position: 30 days on official cell phones.
FILE PHOTO: China's flags are seen near a TikTok logo in this illustration picture taken July 16, 2020. REUTERS/Florence Lo/Illustration/File Photo
The White House late Monday gave federal agencies 30 days to withdraw the application of government electronic signals, in compliance with a law passed by Congress at the end of last December, which also prohibited their use in the House of Representatives and in the Senate.
This decision, which Canada also adopted yesterday, was criticized by the Chinese government, which denounced an
"abuse of state power"
by Washington.
"We firmly reject the erroneous practice of the United States of generalizing the concept of national security, abusing state power and unreasonably suppressing other countries' firms," protested Mao Ning, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
At the moment, the government ban does not apply to companies in the United States that are not associated with the federal government or to the millions of citizens who use the popular application, through which users share videos.
For its part, the Danish Parliament reported that it asked its deputies and all its staff to uninstall
TikTok from the mobile devices it supplies for security reasons.
According to the institution in a statement, the measure was taken due to "espionage risk" following recommendations from the Danish center for cybersecurity.
A similar move was taken by Canada, which announced it will ban the app citing "an unacceptable level of risk" to privacy and security.
The decision was described as "curious" by a spokeswoman for the Chinese firm, who noted that it was made "without citing any specific security problems" and regretted that the authorities did not contact the company before the official announcement
.
Two of the main institutions of the European Union (EU) also ordered similar initiatives last week, in a decision that the firm considered "wrong."
The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, announced last Thursday the ban to protect itself
"against cybersecurity threats and actions"
and defined a maximum period of March 15.
In tune, the European Parliament (EP) today ordered all its staff to remove TikTok from their work devices due to fears of espionage.
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