New dark clouds approaching on TikTok across the Atlantic. And for good reason, Brendan Carr, one of the commissioners of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the American agency which regulates the telecoms sector, calls for the prohibition of the Chinese application in the United States, in an interview granted to Axios.
On their scale, Brendan Carr and the FCC don’t have the power to directly regulate TikTok, but the US Congress has sided with the commissioner in the past, when he raised concerns about Chinese companies in the telecoms, like Huawei, which was banned from American territory. Consequently, the pressure is mounting on the shoulders of the Biden administration.
Chinese employees gained access to US and European user data
For the time being, it is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) which finds itself in the front line. And for good reason, the organization is currently carrying out a security review of TikTok to determine whether the American activities of the Chinese application must be sold to remain operational in the country of Uncle Sam. New York Times reported in September that an agreement was taking shape, but not yet in its final version. A Justice Department official was particularly concerned that the agreement would not provide sufficient protection against Beijing’s influence.
Indeed, it is the management of American user data by the parent company ByteDance that worries the American authorities. Those fears have deepened in recent days as TikTok publicly acknowledged for the first time in early November that data from its European users can be accessed by its employees in several countries, including China.
This admission echoes revelations in June of BuzzFeed, according to which employees of the platform had had access from China to data of American users at least between September 2021 and January 2022. First in the sights of Donald Trump from the summer of 2020, TikTok hoped for signs of appeasement in the White House after Joe Biden came to power. But the breaking point between the US executive and the Chinese enforcement has never seemed so close.