The push to ban TikTok is on again. Almost two and a half years after the Trump administration threatened to ban the app in the US unless its Chinese owners sell the platform, the Biden administration has issued the same ultimatum.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), after several years of negotiations with TikTok, has issued the recent directive for parent company ByteDance to sell their interest in the platform. This is not the first time a platform has been threatened with a ban, in 2019 CIFUS forced the sale of Grindr (at the time under Chinese ownership). The prevailing concern with TikTok is the amount, and type of data it is collecting, and how that could be used to spread misinformation. There is also concern about what information could be transferred if the app is used on official government devices.
The U.S. is not the only country concerned about potential security threats posed by TikTok. Last week Britain banned the platform on government devices. New Zealand has also said that TikTok will be prohibited on all devices with access to the parliamentary network by the end of March, and the U.S. has directed those with government devices to delete the app by the end of the month.
The bill introduced in the U.S. that gives the Secretary of Commerce a wider scope of power, has been touted as the route to potentially issuing a total ban on the app. While no one has stated exactly how that will work, the most likely scenario is removing it from app stores. For those who already had the app, it would likely still function for a while, but would no longer have any updates or support. If they wanted to take it a step further, regulators could require internet providers to block the app, as India has done with TikTok and many other Chinese-owned apps.
The fate of TikTok remains uncertain, but it is clear that governments around the world are taking the potential risks posed by the app seriously.
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