House Panel Unanimously Advances Bill That Could Ban TikTok

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โ€˜TikTokโ€™s access to 170 million American users makes it a valuable propaganda tool for the CCP,โ€™ Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers said.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce on March 7 unanimously approved two bills to secure Americansโ€™ data and compel social media giant TikTok to divest from its Chinese ownership.

The committeeโ€™s 50โ€“0 decision will allow the bills to move forward in the House, although itโ€™s unclear if the full Congress will express the same bipartisan support for the bills as the committee.

Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said the effort was essential to ending the Chinese Communist Partyโ€™s (CCP) efforts to โ€œtarget, surveil, and manipulate Americans.โ€

โ€œProtecting Americansโ€™ data and addressing the serious national security threat posed by the CCP has been my top priority of all Congress,โ€ Ms. McMorris Rodgers said.

โ€œWe have given TikTok a clear choice: Divest from your parent company, which is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party, and remain in operation in the United States, or side with the Chinese Communist Party and face a ban.โ€

To underscore the issueโ€™s importance, the committee voted to suspend rules that would prohibit their markup session from occurring less than a week after public notice, using an exemption carve-out for national security issues.

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act would force the divestment of social media apps determined to be controlled by foreign adversaries that present a national security threat to the United States, namely TikTok.

โ€œThe Chinese Communist Party poses the greatest national security threat to the United States of our time,โ€ Ms. McMorris Rodgers said. โ€œTikTokโ€™s access to 170 million American users makes it a valuable propaganda tool for the CCP to exploit and use for nefarious purposes.

โ€œToday, we take action.โ€

โ€˜Controlled By a Foreign Adversaryโ€™

The committee held the bulk of its markup in a closed session in order to receive classified intelligence from various U.S. agencies.

Ms. McMorris Rodgers said such a mechanism was important to fully grasp how TikTok serves the CCP through its parent company, ByteDance.

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