US Threatens TikTok Ban If Chinese Owners Don't Sell Stakes
The United States government has threatened to ban TikTok if the Chinese owners don’t divest the app’s stakes to them.
TikTok spokesperson, Brooke Oberwetter, revealed what the company had recently heard from the U.S. Treasury-led Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States on Wednesday, Reuters reports.
Oberwetter, in a statement, said, "If protecting national security is the objective, divestment doesn't solve the problem.
“A change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access."
China's Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Wang Wenbin, responded to the US government on Thursday, saying that the United States had yet to provide evidence that TikTok threatened national security.
Wenbin added in a daily briefing that the United States should stop suppressing such companies.
CFIUS, a powerful national security body, had unanimously recommended in 2020 that ByteDance divest TikTok. Under pressure from then-President Trump, ByteDance, in late 2020, unsuccessfully sought to finalise a deal with Walmart and Oracle Corp to shift TikTok's U.S. assets into a new entity.
Source: punch