TiKTok FACES U.S BAN AMID PULLING OUT OF HONG KONG
The world most populous short video app TikTok faces U.S ban despite stopping its operation in Hong Kong. This comes as the U.S Secretary of State ‘Mike Pompeo’ told Fox News that the United States is “certainly looking at” banning TikTok due to concerns that the subject app could be used by the Beijing government as a surveillance and propaganda tool. Certainly another blow on TikTok after it was removed from its largest overseas market. Meanwhile, I wish to apologize for posting this now, just that I want everyone to follow this development.
Prior to Pompeo’s response about the subject app, TikTok had also announced it would pull out of Hong Kong that is currently faced with a wave of control from the Beijing government. Based on this, the subject app spokesperson said “in light of recent events, we’ve decided to stop operations of the TikTok app in Hong Kong”, without further explanation of the company’s decision. Tech giants such as Google, Telegram, Facebook, and Twitter had uniformly made it clear as well in a statement that they would either stop operating or suspend data review requests from the Hong Kong government. A move viewed by many as an outright rejection of Chinese censorship and surveillance or ponders their next step in Hong Kong.
Efforts have also been made by TikTok’s founder ‘Zhang Yiming’ to disassociate TikTok from its owner and Beijing censorship, based on this, keeping overseas data center for TikTik and inaccessible by the Chinese authority was one of the reason of giving outside experts a glimpse into the app’s moderation process by hiring ‘Kevin Mayer’ as the app’s new global face.
Last week’s announcement of TikTok facing U.S ban that emerged from ‘Mike Pompeo’s’ statement that the U.S is “looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, and would not exclude Chinese-owned TikTok which has been compared to other Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei that has been blacklisted as national security threats by Trump’s administration. Pompeo also said, “with respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you that the United States will get this right, too”.
There are concerns over the use of the subject app, however, the fear of TikTok being used as surveillance or to influence Americans alternatively is the use of TikTok’s ByteDance to provide the Chinese government with sensitive TikTok’s data on its U.S.-based users – of which there are over 160 million. While on the other hand, the app’s largest overseas market (India) had also banned the app on the basis of “threat to sovereignty and integrity”.
The U.S action taken against a platform offer viewed as what has become one of the fastest-growing social media businesses in the world, with 800 million monthly active users worldwide have been disagreed by security experts over how concerned the United States should be about TikTok. While at the moment, the mere suggestion will potentially see TikTok’s biggest rival, Facebook scale-up in this space.
At the moment, the Chinese app ecosystem is in no doubt faced with its worst challenge due to the sudden wave of turbulence from its biggest markets – India and the United States.
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