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A powerful US congressional committee has passed a bill that would remove TikTok from app stores unless its Chinese owner divests the video-sharing platform, brushing off a lobbying campaign that had enlisted thousands of its users.
The House energy and commerce committee approved the bipartisan bill 50-0 on Thursday after a classified briefing from officials about the risks the app posed to Americans because of its ownership by the Chinese group ByteDance.
US security officials say Beijing could access the personal data of the 170mn Americans who use TikTok because of Chinese laws requiring domestic companies to hand over information to the government.
In the hours before the vote, TikTok used its app to urge users to call their congressional representatives, providing telephone numbers for the relevant offices based on the zip codes that users had registered. Congressional offices reported being swamped by calls.
After the vote, TikTok said lawmakers were “attempting to strip 170mn Americans of their constitutional right to free expression”.
In another boost for the legislation, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said it was another important bill to “take on China”.
Johnson’s backing and the unanimous vote suggest that the bill will have little trouble passing the House. Supporters hope that will give the measure momentum in the Senate where previous efforts to curtail TikTok have struggled over concerns that include the impact on free speech.
The White House is also backing the legislation, which was written with the help of National Security Council officials.
“Clearly the alignment between the administration, both parties on the hill and the intelligence community ensured this effort to oppose the bill failed spectacularly today,” said Eric Sayers, a security expert at the American Enterprise Institute.
Mikie Sherrill, a retired US navy helicopter pilot and Democratic lawmaker on the House China committee, said this week that Congress needed to ignore the political implications of dealing with the hugely popular app in order to protect American national security.
“I’ve heard far too many times that it’s too popular, or it’s too big to tackle,” Sherrill said. “I’m sick and tired of hearing that argument when we know that the right thing to do for our country is to tackle this problem.”
To address lawmakers’ concerns, TikTok has invested $1.5bn in “Project Texas”, a corporate restructuring designed to wall off US user data from China.
TikTok has argued to its users that Congress wants to ban the app, a claim that sparked pushback from lawmakers who stressed that they were happy for it to survive as long as it was no longer under Chinese ownership.
Ahead of the vote, Mike Gallagher, the Republican chair of the China committee, said TikTok users should view the effort as “surgery designed to remove the tumour and thereby save the patient in the process”.
A big question is whether the Senate will back the legislation as previous bills have stumbled. Emily Kilcrease, a technology and trade expert at the Center for a New American Security think-tank who sees a legitimate national security rationale for tackling TikTok, said the question of free speech could remain a hurdle.
“The basic problem is that, no matter how you construct the bill or executive order text, the business that is targeted is one whose core function is related to speech, and so there is not an easy get out of jail free card when it comes to the speech issues,” she said.
The bill would ban app stores from distributing TikTok unless ByteDance divests the app within 180 days after passage. It permits ByteDance to bring a legal challenge within 165 days of the bill becoming law.
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