Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr believes that the United States government ought to prohibit the use of the social media site TikTok, which is controlled by China.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese corporation ByteDance and has more than one billion users all over the globe, was at one point under consideration for a ban by the Trump administration.
Mr. Carr, who is one of the five FCC Commissioners and is known for being anti-Chinese, has asked Apple and Google in the past to take TikTok off of their app stores.
Mr. Carr told Axios that there was not 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).”
In addition to this, he said, “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.”
Axios says that the FCC can’t control TikTok, which is currently in talks with the Council on Foreign Investment to figure out if the app can be sold by ByteDance and run by an American company.
The software has come under fire for the possibility that it may send data from the United States back to China, where it might then be viewed by the government of that nation.
Vanessa Pappas, the Chief Operating Officer of TikTok, told Congress in September that ByteDance workers in China did not have access to US data and that the company had no plans to give the data to the Chinese government.
“Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner,” a TikTok spokesperson told Axios.
Before the company announced a partnership with Oracle and Walmart, Donald Trump suggested that TikTok should be banned in the US because it was a security risk.
Following Joe Biden’s victory against Donald Trump, the sale of the United States portion of the company was placed on hold.
