Efforts to ban TikTok are increasingly gathering support from U.S. Congress members.
Stocks such as Snap have gone up over 16% in the last five days as a result.
U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner recently stated that he plans to present a bill that would allow the U.S. to ban TikTok, among other Chinese apps.
- If TikTok is banned, apps like Snap are seen as the immediate beneficiaries due to their established presence with younger users and their existing products that offer short-form content.
- Snapchat has 363 million daily active users worldwide, a third of which are in the U.S.
- TikTok has surpassed 1 billion users globally. In the U.S., the app has over 130 million monthly active users, most of whom are 13-30 years old.
- Since November 2022, over two dozen U.S. states have banned TikTok on government-issued devices.
- Some of them are:
- Texas,
- Nebraska,
- South Carolina,
- South Dakota, etc.
- Western legislators and IT experts believe that TikTok has the potential to bring sensitive data from private citizens into the hands of the Chinese government, considering the fact it is essentially headquartered in Beijing.
- Many industry researchers also consider TikTok's algorithm an effective way to spread any propaganda the Chinese government wants.
- The company has denied such claims, saying that it is willing to route the information via its U.S. offices.
The White House recently directed U.S. federal agencies to delete the app from government devices within 30 days due to security concerns.
