After US executive order, TikTok launches information hub website, Twitter account to report its side of story

TikTok: TikTok launches an online information hub and Twitter account! While short-video platform TikTok has already given out its statement on the executive order passed by US President Donald Trump, the Bytedance-owned platform on Monday also launched its own online information hub and a new account on microblogging site Twitter, so that it has a dedicated space where it can register all of its responses, including ones that need to come quickly, like breaking news or replies to tweets.

TikTok’s website tiktokus [dot] info is a platform where it plans to compile all of the company statements, expert opinions, FAQs, news coverage as well as other resources. It has been titled “The Last Sunny Corner of the Internet” to imply that TikTok app is the place where millions of users can express themselves using their creativity. The platform further denied ever providing the data of its users from the US to the Chinese government. It also stated that it was committed to user safety as well as security and also to combatting election misinformation and interference.

It also stated that the concerns over the privacy and security of US users were based on rumours and misinformation doing rounds in Washington as well as the media.

Before the executive order was passed by the US government, the app was being investigated for national security in the US due to its Chinese ownership. While TikTok has claimed that it would never share the user data with the Chinese government, a law was introduced in the Asian country in 2017 which required China-based companies to do exactly that. This raised concerns about the extent to which TikTok would be able to decline the Chinese government’s request.

Apart from this, a recent report by a reputed news platform revealed that for a period of over one year, TikTok had been violating the policies of Google Play Store and collecting the MAC addresses of its Android users. This practice ended in November last year. MAC addresses are considered “personally identifiable information” under some of the privacy laws by the US Federal Trade Commission.