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What’s Going on with TikTok in the United States?
An explanation of what happened and what’s to come.
TikTok is an incredibly popular video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. The app is used by millions upon millions of users. And today, it looks like President Donald Trump is ordering a ban of TikTok in the U.S.
What is ByteDance doing about this, what companies are involved, and is this ban really happening? We’ll explore all of these questions in this article, along with stock price implications. Read on to dive in!
What Had Happened So Far?
In early August, President Trump issued executive orders to ban TikTok (and WeChat as well) from operating in the U.S. if not sold by their Chinese-owned parent companies. He gave them 45 days to complete this task.
The President’s main reasoning for the executive orders was that apps like TikTok automatically capture a lot of information from users, potentially allowing Chinese-based organizations to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build information for blackmail, and more. These are security risks, rather, and not necessarily realities by any means.
