Citing security risks, the 500,000 U.S.-based employees of Amazon were told to delete TikTok from their phones by the end of the day on Friday, according to The New York Times. Workers are still permitted to use the Chinese-owned video app via their laptop browsers, but mobile devices with access to Amazon email are no longer allowed.
“Amazon did not communicate to us before sending their email and we still do not understand their concerns,” TikTok responded, adding “we welcome a dialogue.”
Earlier in the week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that his department was “looking at” banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps “very seriously.”
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, and became available in America when it merged with musical.ly (a different Chinese app, with offices and a foothold in the U.S.) in August 2018. Many believe that K-Pop fans on TikTok were instrumental in intentionally inflating anticipated attendance numbers for Donald Trump’s Tulsa rally in June.
TikTok’s skyrocketing popularity has helped make Sarah Cooper the most important political satirist of the moment, may have brought Quibi to its knees and, to hear her tell it, the video sharing service saved Dame Judi Dench‘s life.
ByteDance hired Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive, to become CEO of TikTok from Los Angeles in mid-May. “We are not really a Chinese company,” he said during a webinar last month, though added “there are a lot of politics going on.”
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