Recently, on December 28, 2020, Monday, the Trump’s Administration Party in the United States has requested and demanded the country’s government to order for issuing blocking restrictions to the Chinese social media app – TikTok in the US on the ground of allegation of national security concerns that of leaking the personal data of 100 million US users.
TikTok Inc. is a company established and owned by ByteDance; this Chinese company ByteDance is operated in the PRC under the name of Douyin. It was released in September 2016 and headquartered in Greater Los Angeles Area, West Coast, USA. It is mainstreamed in a short-video sharing application and social network platform with a facility of developing a lip-syncing video function for creating videos. TikTok is one of the fastest-growing mobile apps all around the Globe which has now also become one of the leading short video platforms in Asia with its world’s largest playback video community.
TikTok is considered controversial due to the data concerns issues and youth protection aspect as well as surveillance and bowdlerization completely in favor of the Chinese government. Further probing into it, it can be said that the parent company Douyin is now progressively repositioning its business activities out of its home country, and in lieu of this, TikTok has expanded its development proficiencies in California, USA.
Earlier on December 07, 2020, the ruling, US District Court Judge in Washington has ensued an order for barring and prohibiting the Commerce Department from forbidding data hosting for TikTok in terms of content delivery services and other technical transactions within the United States. Prior to this, in a separate prior ruling in September, the same Judge had ensued an order of blocking the Commerce Department in the country from wanting Google and Apple to remove the TikTok from their app stores.
Previously this month, the Trump administration had decided not to allow ByteDance a new periodical allowance of an order ensued by the US president in August 2020 for divesting their company TikTok’s US assets in a stipulated period, and now the Trump administration has again newly demanded for command the enforcement the divestiture order after the deadline has expired. Further, following this pressure from the US government, the company ByteDance is in discussions for months with Oracle Corp and Walmart Inc to strike a deal to change TikTok’s US assets into a new entity in the country of United States.