It’s one of the most downloaded apps of all times and famous for its catchy videos.
The Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok has millions of users in the U.S. alone.
But many feel disappointed by President Donald Trump’s threats to ban it in their country.
Now tech giant Microsoft says it will continue talks to buy Tiktok’s operations in the U-S, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
The corporation says it’s spoken to Trump and will tackle his concerns about the social media platform.
Washington is worried users’ data could be shared with the Chinese government and videos censored.
TikTok rejects that.
How far will Trump go in his business war against China?
Presenter: Hashem Ahelbarra
Guests
Victor Gao, Vice President at the Center for China and Globalisation.
Megha Mishra, Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute.
Elliott Zaagman, Co-Host of the podcast China Tech Investor.
The video item below is a piece of English language content from Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera is a Qatari state-funded broadcaster based in Doha, Qatar, owned by the Al Jazeera Media Network.
Australia, officially known as the Commonwealth of Australia, is a sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands. It is the largest country in Oceania and the world’s sixth-largest country by total area.
Canada is a country in the northern part of North America. It extends from the Atlantic to the Pacific and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering 9.98 million square kilometres (3.85 million square miles), making it the world’s second-largest country by total area.
Its southern and western border with the United States, stretching 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi), is the world’s longest bi-national land border. Canada’s capital is Ottawa, and its three largest metropolitan areas are Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Various Indigenous peoples inhabited what is now Canada for thousands of years before European colonization. The Canada Act 1982, which severed the vestiges of legal dependence on the British Parliament. Canada is a parliamentary democracy and a constitutional monarchy in the Westminster tradition, with a monarch and a prime minister who serves as the chair of the Cabinet and head of government.
As a highly developed country, Canada has the seventeenth-highest nominal per-capita income globally as well as the thirteenth-highest ranking in the Human Development Index. Its advanced economy is the tenth-largest in the world, relying chiefly upon its abundant natural resources and well-developed international trade networks.
China is the third largest country in the world by area and the largest country in the world by population. Properly known as the People’s Republic of China, the political territory of the country includes Tibet and Hong Kong. The capital is Beijing.
Donald John Trump was the 45th President of the United States. Before entering politics, he was a businessman and television personality. Trump was born and raised in Queens, a borough of New York City, and received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the Wharton School.
“Hashem Ahelbarra is a roving Middle East correspondent for Al Jazeera English. He regularly reports from Afghanistan, Yemen and across the Gulf region. Hashem has covered many of the biggest international news stories in recent years and secured exclusive interviews with many of the major names in world news, including late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Afghan president Hamid Karzai and former Liberian president Charles Taylor.” – Al Jazeera
Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
New Zealand is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island and the South Island —and around 600 smaller islands, covering a total area of 268,021 square kilometres.
TikTok, known in China as Douyin, is a Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-based Internet technology company founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming. It is used to create short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos of 3 to 15 seconds, and short looping videos of 3 to 60 seconds.
ByteDance first launched Douyin for the Chinese market in September 2016. Later, TikTok was launched in 2017 for iOS and Android in most markets outside of mainland China; however, it only became available worldwide, including the United States, after merging with another Chinese social media service Musical.ly on 2 August 2018.
