US President Donald Trump said he intends to sign an executive order prohibiting the "tuk-tuk" short videos of Chinese company ByteDance in the United States today, Saturday.
Washington suspects the possibility of espionage operations by means of the Chinese intelligence service.
"Regarding Tik Tok, we will work to ban it in the United States," Trump told reporters on board the presidential plane.
And the application "Tik Tok" is very popular with teenagers, especially thanks to its funny videos, which are largely centered on dance and music, and its ownership belongs to the Chinese "Beat Dance" group and the number of its users reaches a billion around the world.
Trump's announcement came after frantic negotiations on Friday between the White House and ByteDance and potential TikTok buyers, including Microsoft Corp. They failed to come up with a deal that would lead the Chinese company to drop US implementations, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks are expected to continue in the coming days.
Strong action
Last July, White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said he expected the US president to take "strong action" against the Chinese "Tuk Tuk" and "Wei Chat" applications, as tension between the United States and China resumed.
Navarro told Fox News that he expected "robust action" from Trump against these two applications he allegedly send all data "to servers in China, directly to the Chinese army, the Communist Party of China and (official) agencies that want to steal our intellectual property."
The move would be the culmination of US national security concerns about the integrity of the personal data Tik Tok addresses.
The crackdown on Tik Tok is one of several campaigns targeting China-based companies, which have found themselves at the center of the growing tensions between the United States and China over trade, technology and the Corona epidemic.