Yahoo Finance Commissioner for federal regulator says US should ban Chinese-owned TikTok
The US government should ban the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok, according to Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr.
TikTok, which has more than one billion users worldwide, is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and once faced a ban under the Trump administration.
Mr Carr, who is one of five FCC Commissioners and a critic of China, has previously called for Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their stores.
Mr Carr told Axios that there was not a “world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the (Chinese Communist Party).”
And he added: “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.”
The FCC has no authority to regulate TikTok, which is in negotiations with the Council on Foreign Investment on whether it can be divested by ByteDance and be run by an American company, reports Axios.
The app has been the subject of criticism over American data potentially being sent back to China and accessed by the country’s government.
TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas told Congress in September that ByteDance’s staff in China had no access to US data and the company would not give it to the Chinese government.
The Independent has reached out to TikTok for comment.
“Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner,” a TikTok spokesperson told Axios.
Donald Trump proposed banning TikTok in the US citing security concerns before the company announced a partnership with Oracle and Walmart.
The sale of the US part of the business was put on hold after Joe Biden defeated Mr Trump.
