TikTok confirmed to AFP on Wednesday that the US government had recommended selling the app from its owner, Chinese group ByteDance, as pressure mounts on the popular platform in the United States.
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According to the Wall Street Journal and other American dailies, the White House has issued an ultimatum: if TikTok stays in ByteDance’s ranks, it will be banned in the United States.
The app is considered a national security threat by many Western lawmakers because it is owned by a Chinese company.
In the United States, the launching of an alleged Chinese spy balloon in February sparked renewed efforts in Congress to ban the entertaining short video service, which has been accused of giving Beijing access to user data around the world, something it has always denied.
The White House request comes from CFIUS, a government agency responsible for assessing the risks of foreign investments to US national security.
The government and Treasury declined to comment.
“When the goal is to protect national security, a divestment does not solve the problem: (The fact that the application) changes ownership does not mean that new restrictions on the flow of data or access to it are imposed,” responded one Spokesperson for TikTok, contacted by AFP.
“The best way to address national security concerns is to use the US user privacy systems with stringent controls and third-party reviews that we already put in place,” she added.
“Middle of the Ring”
TikTok, which goes to great lengths to convince politicians and the public of its integrity, counted on CFIUS to find a compromise.
“The quickest and most effective way to address these concerns (…) is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we have been working with them on for more than two years,” a spokesman for TikTok said in late February.
He was responding to consideration of a Republican-backed bill that would give President Joe Biden the power to ban TikTok outright.
The White House has already banned federal agency officials from having the app on their smartphones, under legislation ratified in early January. The European Commission and the Canadian government recently made similar decisions for their officials’ mobile phones.
The company stores US user data on servers located in the country. She acknowledged that China-based employees could access it, but under a strict and limited framework, and not the Chinese government.
In the summer of 2020, former President Donald Trump signed several executive orders to try to ban the platform or have it bought by an American company.
“TikTok is reliving the 2019/2020 saga,” said Dan Ives of Wedbush.
“As tensions between the United States and China escalate, the app finds itself caught in the middle of the ring,” the analyst added in a note.
The platform’s already considerable popularity has exploded in favor of the pandemic, and well beyond its original audience, teenagers.
The app has over 100 million users in the United States. It has overtaken YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in terms of the “time” American adults have spent on each platform in recent years and now lags behind Netflix, according to Insider Intelligence.
The powerful US civil rights group ACLU has spoken out against the anti-TikTok laws in the name of freedom of expression.