TikTok, the popular short-video social media platform, was recently banned in India along with 58 other Chinese applications. This happened because of the political crosshairs amid rising tensions related to the India-China border dispute.
However, the app isn’t just stuck in the political game between India and China but is also facing issues from the United States government. Mike Pompeo, US Secretary of State said during Fox News interview that the country is “certainly looking at” banning TikTok over concerns about the app being Beijing’s surveillance and propaganda tool.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has been working to disassociate TikTok from its Chinese ownership and Beijing censorship. TikTok has previously said that it operates separately from ByteDance. It says that the data centers are located entirely outside of China and that none of that data is subject to Chinese law.
The application is hugely popular in India, the United States, as well as other eastern countries. To give context, the app was downloaded 315 million times in the first three months of this year — more quarterly downloads than any other application in history.
Meanwhile, TikTok has announced that it would pull out of Hong Kong, which is facing an unprecedented wave of control from the Beijing government after the promulgation of the national security law.
Another Chinese company is already in the crosshairs between the US-China trade war — Huawei. The company has been effectively banned from doing business with any of the US-based company or technology. But despite the ban from the U.S., the company keeps growing and recently surpassed Samsung to become the world’s largest smartphone maker.
