“As for TikTok, we ban it in the United States,” Donald Trump told reporters aboard the presidential plane Air Force One. He added that he would act as of this Saturday. TikTok, a social network for sharing short videos, has nearly a billion users worldwide and is very popular with teens and young people. Except that this social network belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance, and was the subject of an investigation by CFIUS, the American agency responsible for ensuring that foreign investments do not present a risk to national security.
A social network belonging to a Chinese group ...
Steven Mnuchin, the US Secretary of the Treasury, said Wednesday that he would make a "recommendation" on TikTok to the White House this week. TikTok has often had to defend itself from its ties to China, where ByteDance has a similar app, under a different name. She has always denied sharing data with the Chinese authorities and assured that she does not intend to accept requests in this regard.
... which scares American elected officials
But a few weeks before the presidential elections across the Atlantic, elected officials fear that TikTok will be used to interfere in the ballot. In a letter unveiled this week, a group of prominent Republican senators including Florida lawmaker Marco Rubio and his Arkansas colleague Tom Cotton asked the administration to look into the phenomenon, the agency reports. Reuters press. They accuse TikTok of censoring certain content and fear that the Chinese Communist Party will use its control over the application "to distort or manipulate political rhetoric in order to sow discord among Americans and obtain the electoral result it expects ".
Last month, TikTok users said they partially "sabotaged" Donald Trump's Tulsa rally, which was meant to symbolize the re-launch of the outgoing president's campaign but failed to draw the expected crowds. They mobilized to register online, blocking some of the places without ever having intended to go.