The United States of America House of Representatives has passed landmark bill to ban for a TikTok in the country.
The US House of Rep gave ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok six months to sell its controlling stake or the app would be blocked in the US.
According to BBC reports, the bill has passed overwhelmingly in a bipartisan vote, it will, however, still need to clear the Senate and be signed by the president to become law.
Speaking on the passage of the bill, Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who co-authored the bill said, “The US could not take the risk of having a dominant news platform in America controlled or owned by a company that is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party”.
According reports monitored from British Broadcasting Corporation, BBC, the Beijing-based firm is registered in the Cayman Islands and has offices across Europe and the US.
On his part, the president of the US, Joe Biden has promised to sign it as soon as it lands on his desk, if the bill does manage to secure approval in the Senate, which could prompt a diplomatic spat with China.
Commenting on the bill, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson of Chinese, Wang Wenbin said “The move would come back to bite the US”.
According to the bill, ByteDance would have to seek approval from Chinese officials to complete a forced divestiture, which Beijing has vowed to oppose.
Wenbin said that Chinese companies are subject to a national security law requiring them to share data with the government on request and TikTok has tried to reassure regulators that it has taken steps to ensure the data of its 150 million users in the US has been walled off from ByteDance employees in China.
Commenting on the issue, the Chief Executive at TikTok, Shou Zi Chew said the company was committed to keeping its data secure and the platform “free from outside manipulation”.
He warned that the bill, if passed, would mean a ban on the app in the US, giving more power to a handful of other social media companies and putting thousands of American jobs at risk.
However, an investigation by the Wall Street Journal in January found the system was still “porous”, with data being unofficially shared between TikTok in the US and ByteDance in China. High-profile cases, including one incident where ByteDance employees in China accessed a journalist’s data to track down their sources, have stoked concerns.
Speaking ahead of the vote, Hakeem Jeffries, a top Democrat in the House, welcomed the bill, he said, “It would decrease the likelihood that TikTok user data is exploited and privacy undermined by a hostile foreign adversary”.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the chamber would now review the legislation.