US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo says the country is considering banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps, as India has recently done. This would have a major impact on the app's numbers.
India was TikTok's biggest audience until the app was banned in late June. This was the second time the country banned TikTok, and the first time was significant enough that it led to lawsuits citing that the ban had unjustly cost ByteDance (TikTok's parent company) hundreds of millions in potential revenue. While there are myriad, tangentially-related political issues that could have also pushed India into taking action against TikTok, the country's given reason is that the app poses a privacy and security risk to its citizens by surreptitiously sending their data to China.
That news is likely not lost on Mike Pompeo as the US government has voiced suspicions about TikTok's use and acquisition of customer data since last year. As CNN Business resolved the issues with Huawei. The most damning statement in the conversation came when the host asked Pompeo directly if he would recommend people TikTok. The secretary replied, "Only if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party," with a smile on his face.
TikTok Responds to Privacy Concerns
There are about 75% fewer TikTok s in the US than there were in India when the app was banned there, but the former is still the country with the most TikTok s today. Even before losing its Indian base, though, TikTok and ByteDance took steps to ease concerns that the app posed a threat to other countries' national security. Earlier this year, the company Disney+, as its CEO. Despite Mayer's obvious value in the digital content creation space, it's impossible to ignore that he was also likely hired to give the company some American leadership and set western TikTok critics at ease.
The bulk of the claims of TikTok being a security risk comes from the app's connection to China. Per Chinese law, a company with servers in China must share data with the Chinese government. TikTok is indeed a Chinese app started by a Chinese billionaire, but the company maintains that it has never shared data with mainland China.
However, just recently, a new law ed in Hong Kong, granting its law enforcement agencies the option to demand online platforms remove any content labeled as a threat to Chinese national security. The move has prompted all other major social platforms (including Twitter) to pause processing requests from police in Hong Kong until more details about the new policy are released. Meanwhile, because TikTok is owned by a company based in China, the only way it could avoid this problem was to completely stop operating in Hong Kong, which it has, as of this week.
Source: Fox News [via CNN Business]