On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the US has been looking at banning Chinese social media apps from the US. Speaking to Fox News, Pompeo suggested that the US wants to do this because there is increasing scrutiny on Chinese tech firms, even as tensions between the US and China mount.
China has been drawing US attention in recent months due to a number of international incidents. High-profile incidents of corporate espionage on the part of Chinese nationals has caused the US to eye China warily in the tech space.
Beyond that, the country’s recent push to strip rights from people in Hong Kong have put them in the international spotlight. As China loses friends on the global stage, the US is considering cutting off many of its major income sources.
TikTok is a very popular social media app that allows people to upload short videos. In some ways, it’s the successor apparent to Vine. Vine was an app that encouraged users to upload short, looping videos. In others, the app is music-focused: trending lip-sync challenges and dances are always blowing up on the app.
However, there have been reservations about the app from some US tech experts. The app feeds data back to its parent company, ByteDance, a Chinese-owned company. This has led some to fear that the app could be used for data harvesting purposes on behalf of the Chinese government.
If that sounds conspiratorial, consider the US’s ban of Huawei, a Chinese multinational tech company.
Speaking to Fox News, Pompeo noted, “Whether it was the problems of having Huawei technology in your infrastructure we’ve gone all over the world and we’re making real progress getting that out. We declared ZTE a danger to American national security,” Pompeo noted.
ZTE is another Chinese telecom company.
Pompeo’s quote referred to the rollout of new 5G network infrastructure globally. Initially, Huawei was part of the project. However, at the US’s insistence, the standard left out Huawei’s technology. This was out of fear that the Chinese government would monitor the relays.
Whether it’s through enterprise cloud storage, password harvesting or spyware, hacking is a major issue in the information age. However, US scrutiny of China is based as much on corporate espionage and distrust as it is on hacking. Time will tell if the US follows through on banning popular platforms like TikTok.
