USA: A bill to ban the use of popular social media app TikTok in the US will be put to vote by the US House Foreign Affairs Committee next month, the committee announced on Friday.

The panel's chairman, Representative Michael McCaul, has proposed a bill that would give the White House the authority to ban TikTok for national security reasons. Bloomberg News, which first reported the timing of the vote, quoted McCall as saying, "The concern is that this app gives the Chinese government a backdoor into our phones."

Donald Trump, who was president at the time, tried to ban the transaction, which would effectively block use of the short video-sharing app in the country in 2020 and prevent new users from downloading TikTok, but he Motion lost in several court cases.

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The Biden administration formally abandoned that effort in June 2021. Then, in December, Republican Senator Marco Rubio unveiled legislation that would ban TikTok and bar all business dealings with social media firms owned or controlled by China and Russia.

The US Congress could impose a ban this year, and McCaul's comments increase pressure on President Joe Biden's administration to force the app's Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its US operations. Some of the current proposals, according to McCall, risk being legally struck down due to concerns about freedom of expression.

The Texas Republican expressed doubt that any proposed firewall would adequately protect US users from the hugely popular short video platform and its Chinese parent. He claimed that the committee is currently working on a new bill that will combine several TikTok ban proposals and address any constitutional concerns.

McCaul's efforts coincide with other efforts to outlaw TikTok in the US House and Senate, including a bill sponsored by Democrat Raja Krishnamurthy of Illinois and Republican Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin.

This week, Representative Ken Buck of Colorado and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri introduced their own versions of the ban. In an interview, Hawley urged the committee looking into TikTok's national security risks to complete its work as soon as possible and claimed that selling the app to an American buyer would address its concerns.

According to TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter, a total ban on the app would be a "piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broader industry issues such as data protection, privacy and online harm".

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"We hope that lawmakers will focus their efforts on addressing those issues holistically, rather than pretend that banning any one service will solve any problem," he said in a statement. that they are concerned about or make Americans more secure."

Recently, the US Congress passed a law banning TikTok from government smartphones, and more than half of US states followed suit. The risks posed by the platform have also been investigated by the Interagency Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

If approved, McCall's legislation would be discussed on the House floor. However, it would be difficult for Congress to ban TikTok, which is popular among teenagers, and would require 60 votes in the Senate.

TikTok, which has more than 100 million US users, has been trying for three years to assure Washington that the personal information of US citizens cannot be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing's control. And manipulate its contents.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to comment Friday on the bill to ban TikTok. She said, "I'm not going to go into the details right now because [CFIUS] is still reviewing it.

According to a law signed by Biden in December, federal employees are not allowed to download or use TikTok on government-owned devices. The use of TikTok is restricted on government-owned devices in more than 25 US states.

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Meanwhile, ByteDance General Counsel Erich Anderson is no longer in charge of TikTok's US government relations as part of a restructuring to strengthen the company's position amid an intensified national security investigation, according to people familiar with the situation. He will continue to oversee work with CFIUS, according to one of the people.