After India, U.S. Considers Banning TikTok For Real This Time

A few Senators want it banned, or at least investigated for censorship, such as Chuck Schumer and Marco Rubio. India banned it last week. And now, ex-CIA man turned Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, says the U.S. should probably ban TikTok.

Pompeo said on Monday that the United States is “certainly looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok, claiming it shares user data with the Chinese government.

For its part, TikTok says it has data storage facilities in the U.S. and Singpore, for example, though it is unclear if all U.S. TikTok users photos and user names are stored there. The company said that it would placate India, which banned TikTok last week along with 58 other Chinese apps, that it could store all Indian data on a server in India, something the company said it would build a year ago, but has not yet delivered on.

“I don’t want to get out in front of the President, but it’s something we’re looking at,” Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News this week.

Senators have raised national security concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data, saying they were worried about Chinese laws requiring domestic companies “to support and cooperate with intelligence work controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.”

Trump recently got a taste of TikTok when some users flooded his Tulsa rally with tickets purchased that no one intended on using. The end result was terrible optics for Trump’s first ever half empty rally. Was Trump punked by TikTok, protesters blocking real ticket holders, or the coronavirus scare? The obvious TikTok ploy is as good an excuse as any of those.

TikTok is the most visible symbol of a China that has gone to near-parity with the U.S. when it comes to new consumer tech. We have Whatsapp, they have WeChat. We have Snap and Instagram, they have TikTok, which is even bigger. It wasn’t a Brazilian, or a Russian, or a French firm that developed TikTok; it was the Chinese. They’re on this, and on a global scale. The other countries are not.

TikTok is the consumer tech poster child of a China that can meet, match, and surpass anything the Western techies can create.

Huawei is the big boy version of that, and it is already being sanctioned with bans on U.S. companies selling microchips to help the company build out its massive 5G infrastructure around the world.

Reuters reported late on Monday that TikTok would leave its Hong Kong office within days, after China’s establishment of a sweeping new national security law for the city.

One of the big problems with banning TikTok, I suppose, will be the fact that it has some Silicon Valley money. Sequoia Capital of Menlo Park, California invested over $100 million in the company’s parent, ByteDance, thought they did that out of Sequioa’s China unit.

Then again, worth considering is the fact that much bigger companies, including Intel, have had long standing relationships with Huawei and they have since failed to influence Washington to lay off the China telecommunications systems maker. Silicon Valley will likely fail to get Washington to lay off TikTok.

India’s move to ban TikTok comes at a time when the country is in the middle of a heated border dispute with China, not far from Tibet. This dispute turned off many Indians to Chinese tech imports in what resulted in a small business boycott of Made in China.

Later, activists targeted TikTok at one of their Indian offices. Shortly after, the Indian government banned dozens of apps from Indian app stores.

The U.S. has its own geopolitical riff with China. The time may be ripe for Washington to make a move on TikTok.