US House speaker says lawmakers to move forward with TikTok bill

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy mentioned on Sunday lawmakers will transfer ahead with laws to deal with nationwide safety worries about TikTok, alleging China’s authorities had entry to the quick video app’s person information.

In the United States, there are rising calls to ban TikTok, owned by China-based firm ByteDance, or to cross bipartisan laws to provide President Joe Biden’s administration authorized authority to hunt a ban. Devices owned by the U.S. authorities have been lately banned from having the app put in.

“The House will be moving forward with legislation to protect Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” McCarthy mentioned on Twitter.

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared earlier than a U.S. House Committee for about 5 hours on Thursday, and lawmakers from each events grilled him about nationwide safety and different issues involving the app, which has 150 million American customers.

In Thursday’s listening to, the TikTok CEO was requested if of the app, has spied on Americans at Beijing’s request. Chew answered, “No.”

Republican Representative Neal Dunn then referenced the corporate’s disclosure in December that some China-based staff at ByteDance improperly accessed TikTok person information of two journalists and have been not employed by the corporate. He repeated his query about whether or not ByteDance was spying.

“I don’t think that spying is the right way to describe it,” Chew mentioned. He went on to explain the experiences as involving an “internal investigation” earlier than being lower off. McCarthy, a Republican, mentioned in a tweet on Sunday, “It’s very concerning that the CEO of TikTok can’t be honest and admit what we already know to be true – China has access to TikTok user data.”

The firm says it has spent greater than $1.5 billion on information safety efforts underneath the title “Project Texas” which presently has almost 1,500 full-time staff and is contracted with Oracle Corp to retailer TikTok’s U.S. person information.

Rather than appease lawmakers’ issues, Chew’s look earlier than Congress on Thursday “actually increased the likelihood that Congress will take some action,” Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, advised ABC News on Sunday.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump misplaced a sequence of court docket rulings in 2020 when he sought to ban TikTok and one other Chinese-owned app, WeChat, a unit of Tencent.

Many Democrats even have raised issues though haven’t but explicitly backed a U.S. ban.

Stay on prime of know-how and startup news that issues. Subscribe to our day by day publication for the newest and must-read tech news, delivered straight to your inbox.