It looks like concerns over the company’s Chinese ownership have real consequences.
Uncovering and explaining how our digital world is changing — and changing us.
It looks like the Trump administration is getting tougher on TikTok, the wildly popular social media app that’s best known as a place for teens to post short videos, amid mounting national security concerns about the app’s relationship with the Chinese government. According to Bloomberg, President Trump plans to sign an order compelling TikTok’s parent company, Chinese-based ByteDance, to sell its US operations. Some are floating Microsoft as a potential buyer.
Trump’s order would direct ByteDance to divest from the US-based TikTok, last valued at around $80 billion, most likely by selling to another company. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed that the app was under government review on Wednesday, and that a recommendation would come by the end of the week. A government decision that forces TikTok to sell would be a game changer for the social media industry and would threaten to disrupt the app’s extraordinary rise in popularity with its some 80 million users in the US, many of them young. And for established US social media giants Facebook and Google, the decision could significantly weaken their fiercest new competitor.
For months, Trump and other politicians have raised concerns about TikTok as a potential national security threat, worrying that the company could censor content or access user data at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok has denied taking orders from the Chinese government to moderate content, and said it maintains all of its American user data outside of China, in either the US or Singapore. But reports last year indicated that TikTok was seemingly censoring content related to the Hong Kong protests, as well as other topics that are controversial with the Chinese government like Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence. These reports have fueled US government suspicions, particularly as China has been expanding its surveillance state in recent years and US-China diplomatic relations have cooled.
Republicans have escalated their attacks on TikTok this summer, with some bipartisan support from Democrats as well. On Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Josh Hawley (R-MO) sent a letter to the Justice Department demanding that the agency open an investigation into TikTok and Zoom over reported violations of “Americans’ civil liberties” and national security concerns about relationships between these companies and the People’s Republic of China.
