Double Whammy For China! US Bans TikTok For Govt Employees

By FnF Correspondent | PUBLISHED: 08, Aug 2020, 13:08 pm IST | UPDATED: 08, Aug 2020, 13:08 pm IST

Delhi: In a double whammy for China, the United States has banned Tik Tok for all its federal employees on Thursday, while American search engine giant Google pulled off 2500 YouTube channels linked to China, over data security & disinformation concerns respectively.

Dealing a major blow to the country, Google deleted over 2,500 YouTube channels having Chinese associations, under its anti- disinformation crusade aimed at eliminating fake information.

China is already facing a threat of app ban from the United States, after India banned over 100 applications of the country as these apps were violative of India’s data protocol and were compromising the data safety of users.

The search engine giant has said it deleted the channels as its effort to weed out disinformation on the video-sharing platform.

Why were the channels removed?

The channels were removed over a period of time between April and June, as part of its ongoing investigation into coordinated influence operations linked to China. As per the company, the banned channels generally posted "spammy, non-political content," but a small subset touched on politics.

The Alphabet’s company has linked the video to similar Twitter activities. The videos could also be linked to the disinformation campaign identified in April by social media analytics company Graphika.

The list of channels have not been disclosed yet.

This comes at a time when Chinese apps are already under fire by US government over data security issues.

TikTok banned for US govt officials:

Meanwhile, on Thursday, the U.S. Senate unanimously approved a bill banning federal employees from using video-sharing app TikTok on government-issued devices. White House has been mulling a ban on the app since weeks now.

The Bytedance owned company has been asked to either sell its operations to US company Microsoft or to face a ban.