President Trump said that banning TikTok was "one of many" options he was considering to punish China for the coronavirus on July 7. One day earlier, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Fox News that administration was weighing banning TikTok due to national security concerns and fear of Chinese surveillance.
TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, the highest-valued privately-held company in the world, and its data collection practices have been scrutinized due to the company's Chinese ownership, though experts told Business Insider that it's policies are similar to US apps like Facebook. A feature in Apple's iOS 14 beta recently caught TikTok accessing clipboard data on devices, reigniting the controversy. TikTok says it has disabled the feature.
Criticisms of the app go back farther than just the past few months. In September, The Guardian saw internal documents that instructed moderators to censor content that could anger the Chinese government, including mentions of Tiananmen Square or Tibetan Independence.
In a statement, TikTok said that these policies were no longer in use as of May. US lawmakers have also been critical of TikTok as a potential security risk, and Sen. Marco Rubio asked the Trump administration to investigate the app, while Sens. Chuck Schumer and Tom Cotton wrote a letter to the head of national security asking for an investigation into the app as a counterintelligence risk.
Here are all the countries, companies, and organizations that have banned TikTok.