House Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and other GOP lawmakers have reportedly begun drafting a bill prohibiting federal employees from using Tiktok after federal communication officials urged the U.S. government to ban the video-sharing app to protect American citizens’ private data.
A Republican aide familiar with the matter told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the House Judiciary Committee is proceeding with the proposal before GOP lawmakers officially hold the majority in the next Congress.
“We’re working on something right now,” the aide told the outlet.
Growing security concerns over the Chinese-based social media app have caught lawmakers’ attention after the Federal Communications Commission said the government agency could not regulate the social media app and the data flow back to Beijing and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Chinese tech giant ByteDance owns TikTok, which currently has more than 200 million downloads in the United States — and according to Fox Business, the company must share its data with the CCP upon request, as required by the country’s 2017 National Intelligence Law.
TikTok officials responded to the FCC, saying the company remains confident that it’s on a path to reaching an agreement regarding national security concerns with the federal government.
However, leaked audio obtained by BuzzFeed News in June revealed that China had accessed U.S. TikTok user data for months while U.S. employees did not have access themselves. The audio covered more than 80 internal meetings at the social media company between September 2021 and January 2022.
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem ordered state government employees to stop using the app immediately last week, saying the officials would have “no part in the intelligence gathering operations of nations who hate us.”
“The Chinese Communist Party uses information that it gathers on TikTok to manipulate the American people, and they gather data off the devices that access the platform,” Noem said in a press release.
Other officials in South Dakota have previously sounded the alarm about the harm the app inflicts on American children and students.
“TikTok delivers garbage content to American students and educational content to Chinese students,” Congressman Dusty Johnson (R-SD) wrote on Twitter, reacting to a “60 Minutes” segment on the differences between content the app promotes in the U.S. vs. in China. “We cannot trust this company.”
Johnson introduced a bill in August to ban TikTok from collecting user data from American users from within the People’s Republic of China. The bill would also have banned TikTok from being downloaded on federal government devices, including military installations and federal agencies.
Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio and Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher introduced legislation last month to outright ban the app in the U.S., warning that CCP officials use the app “subtly indoctrinate American citizens.”
“TikTok is a major threat to U.S. national security,” the senators said, adding “unless TikTok and its algorithm can be separated from Beijing, the app’s use in the United States will continue to jeopardize our country’s safety and pave the way for a Chinese-influenced tech landscape here.”
Rubio said that “no company is truly private” in China.
John Rigolizzo contributed to this report.