A group called the "Trump Make America Great Again Committee" placed several political advertisements on Facebook and Instagram warning American users that TikTok is spying on privacy and calling on them to sign a petition to ban TikTok.
This is seen as the latest move by the U.S. government to put pressure on TikTok.
On July 6, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. was considering banning the app for security reasons.
On July 16, White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said he believed TikTok would become a U.S. company and that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) might force TikTok to restructure to become independent.
On July 17, it was reported that the U.S. government may consider adding TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, to its entity list. In response, James Lewis, a technology expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said, "The government holds all the cards...TikTok couldn't resist."
It is worth noting that Facebook is TikTok's biggest competitor. In July 2019, Zuckerberg mentioned in an internal meeting that "TikTok was the first global hit made by a Chinese tech giant." Facebook was developing a product called Lasso to take on TikTok.
But a year after launch, Lasso hasn't delivered the results Zuckerberg wanted. In the first year of its launch, Lasso was downloaded 425,000 times, compared to TikTok's 640 million downloads in the same period.
