By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday urged Congress not to ban Chinese-owned video app TikTok, a day before a U.S. House of Representatives committee will take up legislation.
“A ban on TikTok would violate the First Amendment rights of millions of Americans who use the app to express themselves daily,” the group wrote on Twitter. The ACLU urged Americans to write lawmakers “and call on them to fight against censorship and support our constitutional right to express ourselves.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to vote Tuesday on a bill to give President Joe Biden new powers to ban the app used by more than 100 million Americans. A proposed ban would require passage by the full House and Senate before the president could sign it into law.
Earlier this month, Biden said he was not sure if Washington would ban TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
“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,” TikTok said Monday, adding it has spent more than $1.5 billion on rigorous data security efforts.
Biden in 2021 withdrew a series of Trump-era executive orders that sought to ban new downloads of TikTok and Chinese-owned messaging app WeChat, and ordered a Commerce Department review of security concerns posed by such apps.
The administration of former President Donald Trump had attempted to block new users from downloading the apps, and ban other technical transactions that TikTok and WeChat both said would effectively block their use in the United States.
The courts blocked those orders, which never took effect.
Committee Chair Michael McCaul’s 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 said TikTok “allows (China) to manipulate and monitor its users while it gobbles up Americans’ data to be used for their malign activities.”
The U.S. government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of fears that user data could be passed onto China’s government.
TikTok said Monday “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.”
TikTok officials have been on Capitol Hill this month trying to convince lawmakers of its efforts to protect data security.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler and Richard Chang)
