By David Shepardson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted on Wednesday along party lines to give President Joe Biden the power to ban Chinese-owned social media app TikTok and other apps.
Lawmakers voted 24 to 16 to approve the measure to grant the administration new powers to ban the ByteDance-owned app used by more than 100 million Americans as well as other apps believed to pose security risks. Democrats on the committee opposed the bill, which was sponsored by Republican committee chair Michael McCaul.
The fate of the measure is still uncertain and it would need to be passed by the full House and U.S. Senate before it can go to Biden.
McCaul told Reuters after the vote that he thinks the TikTok bill will be taken up on the floor “fairly soon” and voted on by the full House this month.
Representative Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the committee, said he strongly opposed the legislation because it would “damage our allegiances across the globe, bring more companies into China’s sphere, destroy jobs here in the United States and undercut core American values of free speech and free enterprise.”
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Deepa Babington)
