- President Trump said he was considering banning the TikTok, implying that it would punish China for the coronavirus.
- TikTok is an especially popular short-form video application among Generation Z, and has accumulated 1.5 billion downloads. His father is the Chinese developer ByteDance.
- US lawmakers have raised concerns about possible national security problems, and TikTok has faced censorship allegations at the request of the Chinese government.
- The Pentagon also issued a warning in December that military personnel should remove TikTok from all devices due to “possible security risks associated with its use.”
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President Trump said banning TikTok was “one of many” options he was considering punishing China for the coronavirus on July 7. A day earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that the administration was weighing the TikTok ban due to national security concerns and fear of Chinese surveillance.
TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, the highest-value private company in the world, and its data collection practices have been scrutinized due to the company’s Chinese ownership, although experts told Business Insider that its policies are similar to American apps like Facebook. A feature in Apple’s iOS 14 beta version recently captured TikTok accessing clipboard data on devices, reigniting controversy. TikTok says that you have disabled the feature.
Criticism of the app dates back more than the past few months. In September, The Guardian saw internal documents instructing moderators to censor content that could anger the Chinese government, including mentions of Tiananmen Square or Tibetan Independence.
In a statement, TikTok said these policies were no longer in use as of May. US lawmakers have also criticized TikTok as a possible security risk, and Senator Marco Rubio asked the Trump administration to investigate the application, while Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton wrote a letter to the chief of national security requesting a Research on Enforcement as a Counterintelligence Risk.
Here are all the countries, companies and organizations that have banned TikTok.
