The company has acknowledged that the Biden administration is toughening its stance and threatening to ban TikTok in the United States if the Chinese owners of the video app refuse to sell their stakes.
The Wall Street Journal broke the news of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States’ ultimatum, and TikTok later confirmed it to CNN, acknowledging that CFIUS had contacted the company regarding national security concerns.
Divestment “doesn’t solve the problem if protecting national security is the objective,” TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan said in a statement Wednesday night.
“Data flows and access would not be subject to any new limitations as a result of a change in ownership. The transparent, U.S.-based protection of U.S. user data is the best way to allay worries about national security.With more than a billion users worldwide, including 135 million in the US, TikTok is one of the most widely used apps.
Due to worries that the video app might be used to gather user data, the social media platform, which is owned by the Chinese Internet company ByteDance, has come under intense scrutiny regarding security and data privacy issues. As tensions between Washington and Beijing increase over claims that the Chinese government has accessed data belonging to American users, the issue has become more partisan.
The White House gave U.S. federal agencies 30 days to remove TikTok from all government-owned devices before ordering them to do so last month. In enforcing their own bans, other nations have followed the example of the United States, such as the European Union and Canada.After passing the No TikTok on Government Devices Act in 2017, Congress demanded that the Office of Management and Budget remove the social media platform from all government-owned devices.
TikTok is a Trojan Horse for the Chinese Communist Party, according to Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., who made the statement after the bill passed in December. “It poses a significant security risk to the United States and has no place on government devices until it is forced to completely sever ties with China.”
TikTok has refuted claims that it shares data with the Chinese government, claiming that its business practices are the same as those of other social media sites.
