If US Secretary of StateThe US government official in charge of foreign policy. Pompeo, who was formerly head of the CIA, has held the post since April 2018. Mike Pompeo were making a TikTok video, he might choose DAGames's song Get Out as his backing track. "This place was not for you to look and see," he would sing to a photo of TikTok's creator, Zhang Yiming. "Take it from me!" Then he would pick up a piece of chalk and turn to a blackboard. "Let me spell it out for you...Get out!"

Pompeo gave the same message more formally in an interview on Sunday. The US government, he said, was about ton curbRestrain. As a noun, it means part of a horse's bridle. TikTok's presence in the USA. And, last night, President Trump confirmed he would ban TikTok from the US on 15 September unless its American operation was sold to a US firm, such as Microsoft, before then.

Trump and Pompeo claim that TikTok is a threat because it is under the control of the Chinese government. According to Pompeo, users are unsuspectingly "feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus - [it] could be their facial recognition pattern, it could be information about their residence, their phone numbers, their friends, who they're connected to".

TikTok protests that these claims are unfounded. Data from its 80 million American users, it says, is stored in the US and backed up in Singapore; it would never be passed on to the Chinese authorities even if they requested it. "When it comes to safety and security, we're building the safest app because we know it's the right thing to do," insists Vanessa Pappas, TikTok's US general manager.

n Certainly, TikTok has gone out of its way to demonstrate its independence. When China passed its controversial new security lawThe law, which came into force a month ago, gives the police power to arrest anyone whose behaviour they consider subversive. for Hong Kong, TikTok announced that it would cease to operate in the territory. It has also hired an American, Kevin Mayer, as its chief executive.

But the fact remains that its parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, where Zhang Yiming was recently honoured by the Communist Party for "resolutely upholding the party's leadership".

According to an expert on China, Martin Thorley, ByteDance should be seen as part of a "latent networkConcealed. It comes from a Latin verb meaning "to lie hidden"." of companies which run themselves, but depend on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for their existence.

"So, if and when the CCP want to pull on the leash, those companies have no choice but to do as they are told - there is no other way." China even has a law requiring companies to co-operate with its security services if asked to do so.

In California, a student called Misty Hong has launched a lawsuit accusing TikTok of misusing her data. She claims she downloaded the app, but did not create an account - only to find months later that the company had created an account for her and "surreptitiouslySecretly or dishonestly. It derives from a Latin verb meaning "to seize something by stealth"." sent videos she never intended to publish to servers in China.

But some believe that Trump has political motives, which are nothing to do with security. For one thing, he is engaged in a trade war and wants to do Chinese companies as much damage as possible. For another, TikTok is largely used by young liberalsWhen Trump held a rally in Tulsa last month, TikTok users claimed to have signed up for tickets they had no intention of using, resulting in an embarrassing number of empty seats. who oppose his policies.

Some say, yes. No matter how independent TikTok claims to be, it has to do the Chinese government's bidding, and it has been suspiciously secretive about how its algorithms work. China's security services are notorious for engaging in hacking and cyber attacks, and it is inconceivable that they would not find a way of using data from tens of millions of Americans to their advantage.

Others argue that data belonging to teenagers messing around is hardly likely to interest Chinese spies. It is much more likely that Trump wants to increase economic pressure on China, and is simply using security concerns as an excuse. He has chosen TikTok as a highly visible target so that he can be seen to be acting tough in the run-up to the US elections.