President Donald Trump’s ongoing war with TikTok becomes one of the most pressing issues in the US-China cold war. Earlier this week, Trump issued an official order giving the Chinese media speaker until mid-September to find an American buyer or banned in the country. He also issued the same mandatory order for the Chinese messaging service WeChat.
This story involves several threads. These app currently has over 100 million American users and analysts believe this could grow very quickly soon to cost $ 200 billion. Trump officials want to block the app because they believe Chinese owners may need to cooperate with the Chinese government, which could also use a platform to enforce or distribute false information, threatening security across the country. If Microsoft and TikTok are able to release this purchase in mid-September – a long-term mandate for such an agreement – Trump is pulling a plug into its US operations.
It is an undeniable twist on Trump’s four-year term in office with Beijing and comes the heat of Trump to pressure other countries to take a hard line in China.
What is WeChat and why does Trump want to stop you?
Critics, however, are concerned that Trump’s recent attempts to turn China into a crackdown could set a dangerous, anti-democratic model in the way governments try to control citizens’ use of the Internet, which will be augmented by world leaders when democracy already recovers.
When a country like the US starts erasing democratic ideas it opens the door for other countries to do the same.”
This can be seen as a surprising analysis at first, compared to the comparison in Iran and Africa, where people have been arrested for exposing non-compliance online. Everything Trump says puts out certain platforms on the American internet.
It is a fact that this is happening in a democratic way that makes Trump’s departure so remarkable. Whether or not Trump has a good reason, as Cheesman points out, closing TikTok is open to debate. TikTok is owned by an independent Chinese company called ByteDance. TikTok itself does not work in China and, in the US case, TikTok maintains that user data is stored on servers within the US.
However, the Chinese are skeptical that Beijing would want TikTok to transfer this data. They suspect the Chinese government could force ByteDance to post content, as is often the case on China’s Internet site, especially on WeChat, where names and images related to controversies such as the Tiananmen Square and Tibet massacres have been banned from group and private conversations.
They fear that the platform might be used to spread false information in the US. And, finally, they believe the name private company is related to China, a major independent power currently shutting down the horns of America.
There is also the ambiguity in the sense that the US jettison TikTok must have come from the internet, to have behaved in some way like China, whose government carefully considers its citizens.