US looks to ban Chinese apps like TikTok

The United States government is looking at banning Chinese social media apps, such as TikTok, from the country. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this without giving details. TikTok itself is withdrawing from Hong Kong.

When asked by Fox News whether the US should immediately ban Chinese social media apps “particularly TikTok,” Mike Pompeo replied that this is being looked at, but that he does not want to pre-empt an announcement from the president. Users should only install these kinds of apps if they want to provide their data to the Chinese Communist Party, the minister claims, without substantiating that claim.

TikTok, which is especially popular with young people, is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. TikTok claims to operate independently of the parent company and, for example, to store data in American data centers with a backup in Singapore. TikTok announces against Axios that it is withdrawing its app from the Google Play Store and Apple’s app store in Hong Kong because of the controversial security law that came into effect there last week. The law increases the power that the Beijing regime has in Hong Kong. As it turned out on Monday, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and Telegram are no longer cooperating with requests from Hong Kong to hand over user data due to the controversial law.