The U.S House of Representatives will vote on a bill Wednesday that would require TikTok to cut connections with its Chinese owner or face ban in the U.S.
The regulation poses the greatest threat yet to the video-sharing app, which has grown in popularity around the world while prompting acute concern among governments and security authorities about its Chinese ownership and potential subservience to the Communist Party in Beijing.
The vote is expected to take place at 10:00 a.m. (1400 GMT) and pass decisively in a rare moment of bipartisan cooperation in a politically polarized Washington.
The fate of the bill is uncertain in the Senate, where key figures are against making such a drastic move against an intensely popular app that has 170 million US users.
President Joe Biden will sign the bill, known officially as the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” into law if it came to his desk, the White House has said.
The measure, which passed unanimously through committee last week, would require TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the app within 180 days or see it barred from the Apple and Google app stores in the United States.
It would also give the president power to designate other applications to be a national security threat if under the control of a country considered adversarial to the US.
The resurgent campaign by Washington against TikTok came as a surprise to the company, the Wall Street Journal reported, with TikTok executives reassured when Biden joined the app last month as part of his campaign for a second term.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is in Washington, trying to shore up support to stop the bill.
China warned on Wednesday that the move would “inevitably come back to bite the United States”.
“Although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, condemning it as “bullying behavior”.
Other efforts to ban TikTok also failed with a bill proposed a year ago getting nowhere largely over free speech concerns.
Similarly, a state law passed in Montana banning the platform was suspended by a federal court on the suspicion that it likely violated constitutional free speech rights.
TikTok staunchly denies any ties to the Chinese government and has restructured the company so the data of US users stays in the country, the company says.
