U.S. House committee unanimously approves TikTok crackdown bill

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce committee on Thursday unanimously approved legislation giving China’s ByteDance six months to divest its TikTok social media platform or face a U.S. ban.
Reuters:
‎

The 50-0 vote represents the most significant momentum for a U.S. crackdown on TikTok, which has about 170 million U.S. users, which had stalled over the last year amid heavy lobbying by the company.
Lawmakers hope to move quickly on the measure and said the U.S. House of Representatives could take up the bill in the coming weeks.
Before the vote, lawmakers got a closed-door classified briefing on national security concerns about TikTok’s Chinese ownership.
“TikTok could live on and people could do whatever they want on it provided there is that separation,” Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House select China committee, said, urging U.S. ByteDance investors to support a sale. “It is not a ban – think of this as a surgery designed to remove the tumor and thereby save the patient in the process.”
Asked if the bill could impact the U.S. operations of Tencent’s (0700.HK), opens new tab WeChat, which then President Donald Trump sought to ban in 2020, Gallagher said he would not speculate but said “going forward we can debate what companies fall” under the bill.
The bill would give ByteDance 165 days to divest TikTok; if it did not, app stores operated by Apple, Google, and others could not legally offer TikTok or provide web hosting services to ByteDance-controlled applications.

MacDailyNews Note: Good.
Smart people do not use or allow their children to use TikTok on any platform. – MacDailyNews, February 15, 2024
‎
MacDailyNews Note: Last May, Montana Governor Greg Gianforte signed legislation to ban CCP-controlled TikTok from operating in the state to protect residents from intelligence gathering by the Chinese Communist Party, making it the first U.S. state to ban the popular short video app.
New York City followed Montana in August banning TikTok from government-owned devices and requiring all city agencies to remove the app within thirty days.
‎
Please help support MacDailyNews. Click or tap here to support our independent tech blog. Thank you!
Support MacDailyNews at no extra cost to you by using this link to shop at Amazon.
The post U.S. House committee unanimously approves TikTok crackdown bill appeared first on MacDailyNews.