US Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy Director Peter Navarro on Sunday said he expected US President Donald Trump to act firmly against TikTok and WeChat, amid rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Trump last week had said he is considering banning the wildly popular TikTok app as a way to punish China over the COVID-19 pandemic.
In an interview with Fox News, Navarro said that “what the American people have to understand is all of the data that goes into those mobile apps that kids have so much fun with... goes right to servers in China, right to the Chinese military, the Chinese Communist Party.”
He said these apps could be used to steal intellectual property.
“So expect strong actions on that” by Trump, Navarro said.
The fast-growing video-sharing app belongs to the Chinese group ByteDance Ltd (字節跳動) and has nearly 1 billion users worldwide.
TikTok has sought to distance itself from its Chinese owners, pointing out it has an American CEO and consistently denying allegations that it shares data with Beijing.
WeChat, owned by Tencent Holdings Ltd (騰訊), is the main messaging application in China with more than 1 billion users.
Navarro also accused TikTok’s new boss Kevin Mayer, former head of Disney’s streaming platforms, of being a US puppet.
On Friday Amazon said it mistakenly sent workers an e-mail telling them to dump the TikTok app from their cellphones because of security concerns.
An Amazon spokesperson later said “there is no change to our policies right now with regard to TikTok.”
Democratic campaign teams for the US presidential election have been asked to avoid using TikTok on personal devices and, if they do, to keep it on a nonwork device.
The research firm eMarketer estimates TikTok has more than 52 million US users, having gained about 12 million since the outbreak of the pandemic. TikTok is especially popular with young smartphone users.
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