Almost four years after India's digital surgical strike on China, the United States (US) has finally opened its eyes to the threat of Chinese apps. Talking about Chinese Apps, TikTok is yet again in the limelight as the House of Representatives passed a bill Wednesday that would require TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States. It means the TikTok Ban in the US is dangling and the Chinese app is open to embrace the legal option to fight the latest crackdown on the app. However, it is also a fact that TikTok is now deeply rooted in the US and as per reports, 170 million US users are currently active on it. As a result, many Americans are protesting against the US TikTok Ban, and sensing the resistance, China has also fired a statement targeting Washington. It is pertinent to mention here that the US TikTok Ban is yet to be enforced and there are conditions that have been proposed to the Chinese App if they want to keep running their business in the United States. Below is everything you need to know-
As mentioned above, the bill passed by the House of Representatives asks TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the social media platform or face a total ban in the United States. To be precise, the company's Chinese owner 'ByteDance' has been given the option of divesting its assets in the US within the next six months if it wants to avoid the ban. The Bill however faces a somewhat more uncertain path in the Senate — where some favor a different approach to regulating foreign-owned apps posing security concerns.
It is pertinent here that TikTok is among the most downloaded and used apps in the United States. Talking about numbers, it surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in downloads in 2018 and reported a 45% increase in monthly active users between July 2020 and July 2022. The meteoric rise in TikTok's popularity in the US got multiple lawmakers' attention. As a result, multiple US lawmakers alleged that TikTok can share American information with China.
However, TikTok has repeatedly stated it has not and would not share US user data with the Chinese government, but lawmakers’ concerns were exacerbated by news investigations that showed China-based employees at ByteDance had accessed nonpublic data about US TikTok users. The Chinese App TikTok has argued that the United States' user data is not held in China but in Singapore and in the US, where it is routed through cloud infrastructure operated by Oracle, an American company.
As per reports, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin accused the US of "suppressing TikTok" despite the fact that it "never found evidence that TikTok threatens national security."
Wang was quoted saying, "This kind of bullying behaviour that cannot win in fair competition disrupts companies' normal business activity, damages the confidence of international investors in the investment environment, and damages the normal international economic and trade order." Wang added, "In the end, this will inevitably come back to bite the United States itself."