Shares in American social media companies Snap and Meta rose following an interview with a Federal Communications Commissioner who said the U.S. government should ban TikTok.
“I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” Republican Commissioner Brendan Carr told Axios in an interview.
There simply isn’t “a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.
While the comments from Carr, one of four current commissioners at the agency, do not necessarily signal any pending action against TikTok it does offer insight into the regulatory body.
Carr, who was appointed during the previous administration by then-president Trump, wrote a letter to Apple and Google earlier this year calling on the tech giants to pull TikTok from their app stores over concerns about data harvesting.
According to the Axios report, TikTok has more than 200 million downloads in the U.S. alone, “becoming a form of critical information infrastructure — making the app’s ownership by a Chinese parent company a target of growing national security concern.”
Currently, the company is in negotiations with Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to determine if TikTok can be divested by Chinese parent company ByteDance to an American company to remain operational in the US
Back in September, The New York Times reported that a deal was being worked on but there were concerns that it didn’t provide enough distance from Beijing.
According to data from the Alliance for Securing Democracy, nearly 30 percent of major-party candidates in Senate races and one-fifth of all major-party House candidates have TikTok accounts.
