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It wouldn’t be 2020 without a Chinese social media app kicking off a new Cold War. On Thursday, TikTok threatened the Trump administration with legal action. This came after an executive order that would ban the app in the US.
The move prompted Microsoft to offer to purchase the rights to the app in the US and other regions. This drew a swift rebuke from China. The nation accused the US of trying to “rob” China of the very popular app.
The tensions come amid a rising tide of fights between the US and China. For years, American companies have said that Chinese tech firms used corporate espionage to steal their secrets. As such, China saying that the US is trying to “rob” them is ironic, to say the least.
Widespread rumors against TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, have held that the company uses the app to harvest data. They say the app then passes the user data on to the Chinese government. China’s totalitarian government exerts near-total control over most businesses within the country.
China infamously has very lax intellectual property laws, and they’re even more loose with America. Companies like Apple and Google say China stole their secrets. They say foreign agents have passed trade secrets on to companies like Huawei in China. TikTok is simply the crux of the latest version of this tech conflict between China and the US.
The company felt shock when the order from Trump came down. ByteDance says that the Trump Administration tossed out due process of law when it issued the order. In a blog post, the company wrote,
“This Executive Order risks undermining global businesses’ trust in the United States’ commitment to the rule of law, which has served as a magnet for investment and spurred decades of American economic growth.
“And it sets a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets. We will pursue all remedies available to us in order to ensure that the rule of law is not discarded and that our company and our users are treated fairly — if not by the Administration, then by the US courts.”
As this controversy swirls, TikTok remains a very popular app in the US. Even people with the best phone and top three touch-screen laptops are logging on to the silly lip-synching video app daily.
