Discussions about the need to either take control of the social network TikTok or ban it outright in the US have been going on for years, and in the past advocacy groups have devised a plan dubbed Project Texas to meet the demands of the to comply with the United States. If it doesn’t work out, ByteDance is willing to sell or list TikTok’s US business.
Image source: Hollie Adams, Bloomberg
The agency publishes at least this information about the current considerations of the TikTok management Bloombergcall it extreme measures. If ByteDance, which developed TikTok, decides to sell the company or take it public in the US, such a deal would still have to obtain approval from the Chinese government, making an alternative plan difficult to implement.
Last year, the so-called Project Texas involved the involvement of the American group Oracle in the storage and processing of TikTok users’ data in the United States, as well as the creation of a special committee of three officials who would oversee the activities of this social network. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) did not approve of this initiative, causing confusion and uncertainty among TikTok management about the future fate of the social network in the US. According to others, the project met with opposition from the Justice Department.
At the same time, legislative activity by American officials over the past few days has created all the necessary conditions for a total ban on TikTok in the United States. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will address US lawmakers next week about the social network’s privacy policy and answer questions about possible ties to the Chinese Communist Party. According to TikTok officials, the measures envisaged in the Project Texas plan would raise the level of security of user data in the United States to a level that cannot be matched by any American company. Banning TikTok or separating it from ByteDance would have nothing to do with US national security interests, according to the social network.
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