video app
Media: US government demands Tiktok change of ownership
The US government is demanding that Chinese shareholders exit Tiktok. photo
© Michael Dwyer/AP/dpa
The United States is concerned about its national security. However, Tiktok itself does not see any questionable connections to China.
According to media reports, the US government wants another change of ownership for the popular video app Tiktok. The demand is that Chinese shareholders should get out, wrote the “Wall Street Journal” and the website “The Information” on Thursday night. The reason given was national security concerns.
Tiktok replied that a change of ownership would not change the data flows. According to the financial service Bloomberg, however, a spin-off of Tiktok from the parent company Bytedance is already being considered.
The call for a change in ownership reportedly came from the government body Cfius (Committee on Foreign Investment in the US), which scrutinizes foreign investments in the US.
Tiktok itself emphasizes that it does not see itself as a subsidiary of a Chinese company, since Bytedance is 60 percent owned by western investors and has its official headquarters in the Cayman Islands. Critics point out that the Chinese founders held higher voting rights with a 20 percent stake and that Bytedance has a large headquarters in Beijing.
Tiktok promotes “Project Texas”
In the US, there are concerns among both Republicans and US President Joe Biden’s Democrats that Chinese authorities and intelligence agencies could use Tiktok to gather information about Americans or influence them. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had already tried to force the sale of Tiktok’s international business with a threat of a ban, but was stopped by US courts.
Tiktok has been trying for months to convince the US government with a model in which data is stored on servers in the US and access to it is to be monitored by American technology partners. Part of this “Project Texas” is that the Tiktok app is first checked by the software giant Oracle for every update before users can download it.
The best way to address national security concerns is transparent, US-based protection of US users’ data and systems, with robust third-party monitoring, screening, and verification already in place, like a Tiktok spokesman wrote on Thursday.
Tiktok also proposed a similar model with three data centers in Ireland and Norway for Europe under the name “Project Clover”. The EU Commission recently banned the app from employees’ work cell phones.