Washington (AFP)
Donald Trump again increased the pressure Thursday against the popular social network, as well as the Chinese platform WeChat, with radical decisions, likely to aggravate tensions with China.
The president signed an executive order banning, within 45 days, any transaction "of persons under US jurisdiction" with ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok.
The head of state evokes a "national emergency" about the application of light videos which he accuses, without proof, of spying on his American users on behalf of Beijing, in a context of trade and political tensions with China.
"TikTok automatically captures large swathes of information about its users (...), potentially allowing China to track government employees, collect personal files for the purposes of blackmail and practice industrial espionage," justifies the decree.
The president signed a similar decree against the WeChat platform, which belongs to the Chinese giant Tencent.
The official document mentions the same grievances. The mobile applications owned by China "threaten the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States", according to the president.
The decrees do not specify the practical consequences, but the ban on any transaction with the two companies could force Google and Apple to remove the two networks from their app stores, effectively preventing them from being used in the United States.
- "Free society" -
Donald Trump accepted on Monday the possibility of an American group buying TikTok, but before September 15, under penalty of banning the platform.
He also demanded that a "significant proportion" of the transaction price be paid to the state, on the pretext that his government was making the acquisition possible. A concept that has aroused strong criticism and some embarrassment among those around it.
The Microsoft IT group, which seems to accept the president's terms, is in talks with ByteDance to negotiate a forced acquisition.
But that did not appease the Republican billionaire and his allies.
The US Senate unanimously passed a bill on Thursday that bans the downloading and use of TikTok on any device issued by the government to its employees or to members of Congress.
"TikTok represents a major security risk," tweeted the press service of Republican Senator Josh Hawley, co-author of the text.
This text must be approved by the Democratic-majority House of Representatives so that Donald Trump can promulgate it.
On Wednesday, the head of the American diplomacy Mike Pompeo had warned that the United States wanted to ban American phones not only TikTok but also other Chinese applications considered to be at risk for national security.
WeChat also collects "data from Chinese visitors to the United States," the decree notes, "allowing the Chinese Communist Party to spy on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their life ".
- "Intimidation" -
China reacted earlier this week by accusing the United States of "political manipulation" and "intimidation", in the words of the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry.
ByteDance and TikTok, for their part, have been mobilizing since the start of the prohibition threats made by Donald Trump.
The international platform, which has one billion users, announced Thursday the upcoming opening in Ireland of its first data center in Europe for users on this continent.
Until now, all data was stored in the United States and Singapore.
TikTok, which already has teams in Ireland, said the new facilities will create hundreds of new jobs and speed up video loading times.
If Microsoft succeeds, those servers will come back to it.
The American group had initially wanted to buy only TikTok's operations in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but it now wants to acquire all of the app's global activities, according to the report. Financial Times.
The British daily evokes the administrative complexity that there would be to split a social network, both for users and for human resources.
© 2020 AFP