US: NATIONWIDE BAN ON TIKTOK INCHES CLOSER TO REALITY

Sat 28 January 2023:

The House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote on a bill to entirely block the Chinese short-video platform TikTok next month. The US intends to outlaw TikTok nationwide.

Reportedly, the law will give the White House the authority to impose a ban on TikTok due to more pressing national security issues.

The Chinese short-form video creation app was prohibited from being used on mobile devices by the US House of Representatives last month. TikTok must be removed from all mobile devices, under a House directive.

TIKTOK BANS HIT MORE U.S. STATES AMID MOUNTING SECURITY CONCERNS

A TikTok spokesperson told South China Morning Post that a total ban of the app is a “piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy and online harms”.

“We hope that lawmakers will focus their energies on efforts to address those issues holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single service would solve any of the problems they’re concerned about or make Americans any safer,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

Local administrations in 19 US states have already banned TikTok on government issued-devices.

TikTok is currently in talks with the US Justice Department to address national security concerns.

TIKTOK BANNED FROM ALL US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES-MANAGED DEVICES

Earlier reports claimed that TikTok’s parent company, China-based ByteDance, accessed the data of at least two US journalists and a “small number” of other people connected to them.

TikTok denied in October last year that it used specific location data to track certain Americans, responding to a Forbes report that claimed the app planned to conduct such monitoring.

TikTok announced in June that it had begun routing US user data through Oracle to alleviate concerns that Chinese-based employees could gain access to US information.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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