The US House Foreign Affairs Committee is set to vote on a bill to block the use of TikTok in the country next month.

Confirmed by the Republican-led committee and planned by panel chair Michael McCaul, the bill would give the government the power to ban TikTok on the grounds of national security concerns.

The Republican party has been pushing against the Bytedance-owned app since 2020, at which point then-president Donald Trump lost a series of court cases over measures to block the app. This included an order for Bytedance to divest its US business, with it agreeing an ultimately doomed sale to Microsoft.

This effort was formally abandoned by the Biden administration in mid-2021, but returned to the fore in December 2022 when Republican senator Marco Rubio unveiled bipartisan legislation to ban TikTok. This legislation also seeks to block all transactions from any social media firm operating under the influence of China or Russia.

While the House Foreign Affairs Committee may approve the bill, the ban would require 60 votes in the Senate (a 51:49 split in favour of the Democrats) and faces significant hurdles in Congress.

While being less bullishly anti-TikTok than his predecessor, Democrat president Joe Biden last month signed legislation to ban federal employees from using or downloading TikTok on government-owned devices.

For its part, TikTok has argued that US-based user data cannot be accessed or manipulated by the Chinese government. In a statement issued in reaction to the new bill, TikTok said: “Calls for total bans of TikTok take a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms."

The company also said that it had invested around $1.5 billion on a “comprehensive package of measures with layers of government and independent oversight to ensure that there are no backdoors into TikTok that could be used to manipulate the platform".

On Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said that the bill was “under review” but that she was “just not going to get into details on that.”

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