U.S. social media companies such as Meta and Snap saw a spike in their shares after a report said that a Federal Communications Commissioner said that the popular short video social app TikTok should be banned by the U.S. government. Shares of Meta rose by 2.2 percent and of Snap by 3.4 percent, on Tuesday.
Brendan Carr, one of the five commissioners at the Federal Communications Commission told Axios that he did not believe that anything other than a ban would be a path forward. Although the FCC commissioner has no role to play in the ban, the issue of TikTok having access to huge troves of information has been viewed as a potential security risk by both Democrats and Republicans.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) has been reviewing the security implications as TikTok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance.
TikTok maintains that U.S. data is stored outside of China, so the company does not have to hand over information to China but U.S. officials remain skeptical about the issue.
Various outlets have reported breaches. In June, Buzzfeed reported that China-based engineers, who were working at TikTok, accessed nonpublic information about US users. This included phone numbers and birthdays.
In July, Buzzfeed reported that ByteDance, which is based in China, told its employees to put forward pro-Beijing messages to U.S. users of a news app, according to Axios. ByteDance denied doing so.
In October, Forbes published a report that ByteDance was planning to use TikTok for collecting information about certain U.S. users.
Last week, Democratic Senator Mark Warner said, “If your country uses Huawei, if your kids are on TikTok…the ability for China to have undue influence is a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”
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