The House Foreign Affairs Panel of the US confirmed on Friday that it initially planned to have a vote next month on a bill that would make it illegal to use the popular Chinese social media platform TikTok in the US. The bill would ban the use of TikTok in the US.

The goal of the bill is to give the White House the legal tools it requires to ban TikTok in the US because it poses a threat to national security.
 

A representative for TikTok said that a complete ban on the app would be a “piecemeal approach to national security.”
 

Representative Michael McCaul, who is in charge of the panel, wants to pass a bill that would offer the White House the legal tools it needs to ban TikTok if it is a threat to national security.

'The worry is that this app provides the Chinese government a back entrance into our phones,' McCaul told Bloomberg News, which first reported the date of the vote.

In 2020, when Donald Trump was president, he tried to stop new people from downloading TikTok and stop other transaction records that would have stopped people from using the short video-sharing app in the country. However, he lost a series of court cases over the measure.
 

The Biden administration officially dropped the initiative in June 2021. Then, in December, Senator Marco Rubio, a Republican, proposed bipartisan legislation that would prohibit TikTok and any transactions from social media companies based in or influenced by China and Russia.

McCaul's statements are the clearest indication so far that the US Congress may pass a ban this year, and they increase the pressure on the Biden administration to get the app's US operations sold off by its Chinese parent firm, ByteDance.
 

McCaul warned that some of the pending plans may be banned in court due to free speech concerns.

The Texas Republican has expressed doubt that a firewall between the massively popular short video platform and its Chinese company would provide sufficient security for US consumers. 
 

He stated that the committee was working on a new measure that would address any constitutional difficulties with a ban on TikTok by combining various previous suggestions to do so.

Meanwhile, other bills have been introduced in the House and Senate to restrict TikTok in the United States, including a bill co-sponsored by Republican Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin and Democrat Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois.

Both Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Representative Ken Buck of Colorado have sponsored their own versions of the ban this week. In an interview, Hawley voiced his support for the sale of TikTok to an American purchaser and called for the committee investigating the app's potential impact on national security to move quickly.