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Yes, Trump Really Is Banning TikTok—and Soon

Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI - Getty Images
Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI - Getty Images

From Popular Mechanics

  • President Donald Trump is banning TikTok from U.S. app stores by Sunday.

  • U.S. officials are concerned with TikTok because the hugely popular, Chinese-owned app can potentially pass on users’ data to the authoritarian Chinese government.

  • The U.S.-owned tech company Oracle is in talks with TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to purchase or acquire a majority stake in the app.


President Donald Trump is making good on his controversial promise to ban TikTok in the U.S., the Department of Commerce announced today. The move comes months after his administration first teased the idea of outlawing the enormously popular video-sharing app as part of a crackdown on Chinese-owned and -operated technology due to national security concerns.

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In addition to TikTok, which may boast as many as 70 million active users in the U.S. and more than 800 million worldwide, Commerce also announced a ban on the Chinese-owned WeChat from U.S. app stores. “The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has demonstrated the means and motives to use these apps to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and the economy of the U.S.,” the release from Commerce reads.

“At the President’s direction,” Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said, “we have taken significant action to combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data, while promoting our national values, democratic rules-based norms, and aggressive enforcement of U.S. laws and regulations.”

As of September 20, the U.S. is officially prohibiting “any provision of service to distribute or maintain” WeChat or TikTok through U.S. app stores, as well as using WeChat to send funds or processing payments within the U.S. By Sunday, no U.S. company can offer internet hosting or peering services to WeChat, or use the app’s code “in the functioning of software or services developed and/or accessible within the U.S.,” per the release.

Crucially, these same prohibitions go into effect for TikTok on November 12—eight days after the U.S. presidential election. Trump imposed that deadline for the “national security concerns posed by TikTok to be resolved,” according to the Commerce statement. “If they are, the prohibitions in this order may be lifted.”

Trump’s impending ban “threatens to deprive the American people and small businesses across the U.S. of a significant platform for both a voice and livelihoods,” TikTok spokesman Josh Gartner said in a statement.

In July, the Committee on Foreign Investment, which U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin leads, ordered the Beijing-based ByteDance to divest TikTok. While ByteDance was once in talks to sell TikTok to Microsoft, it’s now working with Oracle, the American tech company, on a potential deal and could announce one soon to quell Trump’s concerns.

Last month, Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that he could use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to institute the TikTok ban, according to a pool report via David Cloud of the Los Angeles Times. “Well, I have that authority,” Trump said. “I can do it with an executive order or that,” referring to the emergency economic powers. Indeed, Trump signed such an order on August 6.

Chatter surrounding a potential TikTok ban reached a fever pitch in July, when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News host Laura Ingraham that U.S. citizens should only download TikTok “if you want your private information in the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.”

Pompeo’s comments followed the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) move in June to designate two Chinese companies, Huawei and ZTE, as national security threats, saying officials could no longer use money from its $8.3 billion Universal Service Fund to “purchase, obtain, maintain, improve, modify, or otherwise support any equipment or services produced or provided by these suppliers.”

Photo credit: Grayhood
Photo credit: Grayhood

Critics say TikTok, which the Beijing-based company ByteDance owns, invades the privacy of its users, potentially passing on data—including hardware IDs, IP addresses, WiFi access points, and GPS pings—to the authoritarian Chinese government. And TikTok does acknowledge some of these claims in its privacy policy, saying it can “automatically collect certain information from you when you use the Platform, including internet or other network activity information such as your IP address, geolocation-related data ... unique device identifiers, browsing and search history.”

That discrepancy in privacy policy boils down to a big difference in what the U.S. and China ultimately do with people’s data.

“China has a very different legal framework and perspective on the rule of law,” Andrea Little Limbago, chief social scientist at Virtru, an encryption and privacy company, told Popular Mechanics last year. “TikTok claims they do not store data in China, but this is difficult to validate and does not address data privacy concerns prior to February 2019.” (That’s when TikTok was fined for its data privacy usage.)

“This is especially relevant as user data could inform intelligence campaigns targeting American citizens,” Little Limbago said.

Some speculate that part of Trump’s distaste for TikTok may stem from a covert campaign among some of the app’s young users back in June, when they reportedly purchased a large amount of tickets to the president’s campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma without any intention of attending the event. Shortly after the Trump administration caught wind of the scheme in the wake of poor attendance numbers in Tulsa, it began running anti-TikTok ads on Facebook.

The U.S. isn’t the first country to make the drastic move of banning TikTok. In July, India banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok. In a statement, India’s Ministry of Information Technology said it has received complaints from “various sources” about misuse of some iOS and Android apps for “stealing and surreptitiously transmitting users’ data in an unauthorized manner to servers outside India.”

We’ll continue to update this story as more information becomes available. In the meantime, to keep your data safe, be extra vigilant about reading the privacy policies for all of your apps—especially TikTok. Start with this simple checklist:

Additional reporting by Kristina Libby and Courtney Linder

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