The US administration may ban the TikTok application in the country, senior White House reporter for Bloomberg, Jennifer Jacobs, said on Twitter.
BREAKING: Trump admin decision on TikTok is imminent, sources tell me, @jendeben and @SalehaMohsin
— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) July 31, 2020
On Thursday, Senators Richard Blumenthal and Josh Hawley wrote a letter to Assistant Attorney General John Demers, asking the US Department of Justice to investigate the national security implications and threat to civil liberties of Zoom and TikTok's links to China. They said that they were very concerned about Zoom and TikTok disclosing private information about Americans to China.
Also this week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that a national security review of TikTok would be presented to the White House within days along with possible "alternatives" to the application.
Prior to that, several Republican senators, including Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Ted Cruz, and Kevin Cramer, addressed the Trump administration, as well as the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, asking them to look into the possibility of Beijing meddling in the 2020 presidential election in the US by means of its alleged control over ByteDance, a Chinese company that owns TikTok.
China has repeatedly denied US allegations about stealing private information from American citizens. As a TikTok spokesperson pointed out in an interview with The Hill earlier this week, the video platform's "content and moderation policies are led by our US-based team in California and aren't influenced by any foreign government."
