US Tik Tok ban set to come into force - here's why President Trump has banned it
Donald Trump has ordered a clampdown of TikTok and WeChat in the United States in a bid to block China 'maliciously' collecting data.
From Sunday onwards, the US Commerce Department will roll out a ban of transactions using the popular social media apps.
US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the order was put in place on Friday to “combat China’s malicious collection of American citizens’ personal data”.
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He said in a statement: “At the President’s direction, 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."
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The US government previously said that using and downloading the app to communicate will not be a banned transaction, although messaging on the app “could be directly or indirectly impaired” by the ban, and people who use it for messaging will not be subject to penalties.
Some security experts have raised concerns that ByteDance Ltd, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, would maintain access to information on the 100 million TikTok users in the United States, creating a security risk.
TikTok has expressed “disappointment” over the move and said it would continue to challenge President Trump’s “unjust executive order.”
China’s ministry of commerce condemned the ban, and urged the U.S. to stop what it called bullying behavior and wrongdoing