The threats against TikTok are beginning to add up
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
For the past 10 years, any regulation of social media companies in the United States has moved at a glacial pace. But when it comes to TikTok, the government is moving with unusual speed.
It has been less than two weeks since two senators first asked the director of national intelligence to look into whether TikTok, the looping short-form video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, poses a security risk to the United States. On Friday, the investigation entered phase two: an inquiry into whether ByteDance might be forced divest Musical.ly, an American app that ByteDance acquired in 2017 for $1 billion and helped form the basis for TikTok.
Greg Roumeliotis, Yingzhi Yang, Echo Wang, and Alexandra Alper had the exclusive at Reuters:
The…
