- Social networks.Tik Tok, the new favorite app of your children that you will not understand
- Apps.TikTok, fined for violating the privacy of minors
The United States will investigate the Chinese social network TikTok to determine if it can be considered a threat to national security. This network, in which users upload short videos of up to 60 seconds, has become one of the most popular among the American youth audience, with more than 27 million users in the country that open the app, on average, more eight times a day, according to company data leaked in the month of February.
A quick look at the social network does not in principle suspect big problems. Most of the videos are dances, memes, internal jokes, challenge videos and songs. It is a network with content in a more optimistic tone and much less serious than what can be seen on Facebook or Instagram.
But the origin of the application at a time of high commercial tension between China and the US and how fast it is expanding throughout the world (it already has more than 500 million active users ) begin to worry some US senators.
Two of them, Democrat Charles E. Schumer and Republican Tom Cotton, have asked intelligence services to thoroughly study the operations of the social network. "With 110 million downloads in the US alone, TikTok is a potential spy threat that we cannot ignore." Senators request that the data that TikTok treasures from its users and whether there are filters or some type of censorship imposed from China be studied.
They also wonder if it could be used for foreign powers to influence the next US elections , as happened with Twitter and Facebook in the 2016 presidential elections. An FBI investigation concluded this year that Russia took advantage of these networks to disseminate propaganda during the electoral period favoring the candidacy of the current president of the country, Donald Trump.
TikTok, which has recently started expanding its advertising business in the US, says US user data is stored on local servers , not in China, but US security agencies fear that if the Beijing government presses To ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, it will have no choice but to obey.
ByteDance launched the TikTok market in September 2017 as a combination of a previous social network, Douyin, with Musical.ly, an app born in Shanghai but with a US presence. that the company acquired that same year for about 800 million dollars. The exponential growth of the app has catapulted the valuation of ByteDance, now considered one of the most successful start-ups in the world, with a value close to 78,000 million dollars.
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