The United States government is looking into banning Chinese social media apps, US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo said.
Mike Pompeo was asked whether the United States should consider a ban on Chinese social media apps. “With respect to Chinese apps on people’s cell phones, I can assure you the United States will get this one right too, Laura,” he told Laura Ingraham from Fox News who posed the question to him. “I don’t want to get out in front of the President, but it’s something we are looking at.”
Chinese apps are not that popular outside China, but one app managed to break that trend and that is TikTok. TikTok has enjoyed massive growth the last two years and filled the void that Vine left a few years ago after Twitter decided to bury it. It hit 1 billion downloads globally in February last year and has over 800 million users globally. Its enormous success shows that Chinese apps.
The United States mulling over banning Chinese social media apps comes at a time when the US-China tensions are on an all-time high. For example, the United States banned US companies from trading with Huawei last year, which led to them releasing Android phones with no Google services.
Chinese apps like TikTok are having a hard time recently. Last week, the Indian government said they will ban Chinese apps like TikTok since they were posing a threat to sovereignty and integrity.
