The trade war between China and the United States is gaining momentum. The next victim may be TikTok, one of the most popular mobile apps in America.
Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer and Republican Senator Tom Catton sent a request to the Director of National Security of the United States. In it, they demanded to assess the potential risks of TikTok.
This is not the first attack on the app this month. Earlier in October, Marco Rubio, another Republican senator, asked the government to launch an investigation into TikTok. The goal is to find out whether the application threatens national security and whether it contributes to the establishment of censorship by another state.
Rubio also asks to consider the legality of buying an American karaoke app Musical.ly . It was acquired by Bytedance, the developer of TikTok, in 2017 for $1 billion. After that, the Chinese company combined both applications under the TikTok brand.
Back this month, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg expressed concerns about the presence of political censorship on TikTok. However, there is nothing surprising in this. Zuckerberg’s company is now developing a direct competitor to TikTok — Lasso.
How the campaign against TikTok will end is still unclear. If Bytedance gets, like Huawei, into the list of companies that pose a threat to US national security, TikTok may disappear from American stores.
This will be a significant, but not a critical blow to the application. According to DataMagic, only 10% of TikTok downloads account for the US market. Also, it will not affect the advertising market in a radical way. According to Appsflyer, as a platform for promoting games, TikTok is not even among the top ten most significant in the United States.
The consequences will be much more serious if the American government demands to cancel the takeover deal. Musical.ly . Previously, such decisions have already been made with regard to social services. In January 2018, Beijing Kunlun Tech bought the dating app Grindr. Now the Chinese company is being forced to sell the service.
In the case of such a scenario, Bytedance will not only lose on the hasty implementation of the asset, but will also have to separate the already integrated solution from the successfully functioning application.
Last Friday, TikTok representatives have already managed to react to the actions of the senators. The Chinese side stated that it stores data about American users in the United States, and their backup is located in Singapore.
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