Will TikTok become the next Huawei?

TIKTOK, a short-form video app and the international version of China's Douyin, has recently landed itself in the soup with US authorities. The trigger is all too familiar: TikTok is accused of posing a security risk to the US through intelligence gathering and its ties with the Chinese government.

In 2017, the parent company of Douyin, ByteDance, acquired American social media app Musical.ly. Douyin was rebranded as TikTok and entered the overseas market. It quickly became viral in the US and insanely popular among the younger generation. Yet that was the start of a series of unfortunate political troubles.

In January this year, an American think tank warned that TikTok was possibly collecting and delivering overseas users' data to the Chinese government. Nine months later, two US senators officially wrote to US intelligence officials requesting for an assessment of TikTok's security risks. Most recently, Reuters reported that ByteDance's acquisition of Musical.ly two years ago is currently being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a committee that looks into national security implications of foreign investments.