Why are governments banning TikTok? It all comes down to China. Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company,
Why does the US want to ban TikTok? The United States wants to ban the application for several reasons. The main reason is national security. U.S. lawmakers are concerned that ByteDance may leak U.S. user data to the Chinese government if the Chinese government forced them to.
TikTok is a national security threat. The Chinese-owned social media platform's parent company ByteDance is based in Beijing and is required by Chinese law to give the government access to collected data.
“In some cases, the bans are due to concerns about national security or data privacy. In other cases, the bans are due to concerns about the content that is allowed on TikTok, such as videos that promote violence, hate speech, or dangerous challenges.”
“ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government. It is a private company,” TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said during the March 23 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
"TikTok has never shared, or received a request to share, U.S. user data with the Chinese government. Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made," CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify on Thursday, according to written testimony posted on Tuesday by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee.
ByteDance says 60% of its shares are owned by non-Chinese investors such as U.S investment firms Carlyle Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Japan's SoftBank Group. Employees own 20% and its founders the remaining 20%. Some details of the relationship between TikTok and ByteDance remain unclear to outsiders.
Will TikTok be banned and shut down in 2023? While TikTok may be getting banned from some devices, the vast majority of users will still be able to access the app and post content to it, keeping it alive for the foreseeable future.
West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation. The app could lose functionality over time. “If there's a ban, there would definitely be no more updates and software enhancements, and over time, it becomes harder to use those apps,” West said.
But based on a 2021 report by Toronto University's Citizen Lab and a January report by Georgia Institute of Technology, TikTok is just as much of a threat to Americans' privacy as competing U.S. based social networks.
Addiction: Since the app boasts an “endless stream” of material, students are likely to spend a long time in the app and might even become addicted to watching the videos for hours at a time. Bullying: A high school principal in New York tells SmartSocial Founder Josh Ochs that students are being bullied on TikTok.
TikTok also engages in what some observers have called invasive tracking measures against ordinary users. These tactics include prompting users to let TikTok harvest their phone contacts lists, as a way of connecting users who already know each other on the app.
TikTok allows users to make short videos, roughly 15–30 seconds in length, and distribute them within the app's following. Most of the videos are based on entertainment, hijinks, and comedy. The site is particularly popular with the under-24 crowd, with about 40% of its users falling in the 18–24 age range.
If you delete your account and uninstall the app from your phone, TikTok can't collect your data going forward, says Katherine Isaac, an executive at cybersecurity firm Carbide. But that doesn't mean all your data disappears right away.
Is TikTok getting banned in the USA? At the time of writing, the government in the United States of America has not announced a ban on TikTok in the country – despite concerns about data sharing with the Chinese government. Whether that will change in the future, however, is unknown.
According to the latest data on TikTok's advertising reach, the United States is home to the majority of TikTok users worldwide, with 116.5 million TikTokers residing there.
The most active TikTok users in the United States: 116.5 million. Also in the top three countries with the largest number of TikTok users are Indonesia (113 million) and Brazil (84.1 million).
These bans have generally been justified with national security concerns, due to TikTok's ownership by the Chinese company ByteDance. As of April 2023, the app has been banned for use by federal employees and banned for use by state employees in 34 (out of 50) states.
After 30 days, deleted TikTok accounts are permanently closed and cannot be recovered.
Today, TikTok's growth is showing no signs of stopping. The latest TikTok statistics show that as of April 2020, the popular video app has been downloaded more than two billion times worldwide on both the Apple App Store and Google Play (Sensor Tower, 2020).
Have any countries banned TikTok? India banned the platform in mid-2020, costing ByteDance one of its biggest markets, as the government cracked down on 59 Chinese-owned apps, claiming that they were secretly transmitting users' data to servers outside India.
Instead, there's a different version of TikTok — a sister app called Douyin. Both are owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance, but Douyin launched before TikTok and became a viral sensation in China. Its powerful algorithm became the foundation for TikTok and is key to its global success.
Fact: TikTok's parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group.