The day before the US House of Representatives was to take up legislation potentially banning the use of the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok, the American Civil Liberties Union urged Congress to step back and leave the issue alone, on First Amendment grounds.
On Twitter, the Civil Liberties group wrote, “A ban on TikTok would violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use the app to express themselves daily.” THe group went on to urge Americans to write their lawmakers, “and call on them to fight against censorship and support our constitutional right to express ourselves.”
On Tuesday, the House Foreign Affairs Committee will vote on legislation which will give President Joe Biden a broad set of new powers to ban the social media app which is used by over 100 million Americans. Any proposed ban would require a further vote by the full House and Senate before the President could then sign it into law.
Earlier this month the President had said he was unsure if TIkTok, which is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, would be banned by the government.
On Monday, TikTok said, “It would be unfortunate if the House Foreign Affairs Committee were to censor millions of Americans, and do so based not on actual intelligence, but on a basic misunderstanding of our corporate structure,” adding that it has expended over $1.5 billion on new, more rigorous data security for its American operation.
In 2021 Biden had reversed a group of Trump-era executive orders which had banned new downloads of two Chinese apps, TikTok and WeChat, and triggered a Commerce Department review of the security issues surrounding such apps.
Former President Trump’s administration had sought to block new users from downloading the apps as well as block other technical actions which both TikTok and WeChat noted would, in essence, prevent their use by Americans residing in the United States.
The orders were blocked by the courts, and never went into effect.
Committee Chair Michael McCaul said his legislation “empowers the administration to ban TikTok or any software applications that threaten U.S. national security. And make no mistake – TikTok is a security threat.”
He went on to note, TikTok “allows (China) to manipulate and monitor its users while it gobbles up Americans’ data to be used for their malign activities.”
A little known, but powerful national security body, the US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, (CFIUS), had ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020, due to fears the video-sharing platform would pass data on US users to the Chinese government.
On Monday, TikTok said, “the swiftest and most thorough way to address national security concerns is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on for nearly two years.”
This month TikTok officials have been making the rounds on Capitol Hill, trying to convince lawmakers they have secured the data of US users against being used by the Chinese government.
