The Chinese social video app said the attempt was rejected because the account would have violated its guidelines. Bloomberg reported that in April 2020 a message was sent to Elizabeth Kanter, TikTok’s head of government relations for the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands and Israel, creating a “Chinese government entity that is interested in joining TikTok but will not wanted to see it openly as a government account, as the main purpose is to promote content that shows the best side of China (some kind of propaganda).” The request was deemed “sensitive” internally and was opposed by senior executives at the company, according to Bloomberg. The TikTok spokesperson said the request was made by a TikTok employee on behalf of a friend. Bloomberg reported that the government entity in question was “responsible for public relations.” Subscribe to our weekly tech newsletter, TechScape. TikTok has more than 1 billion users worldwide and is owned by Chinese technology company ByteDance. TikTok’s community guidelines state that users cannot engage in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” where accounts “exercise influence and influence public opinion by misleading individuals, our community, or our systems about the identity, location, the relationships, popularity, or purpose of the account.” It has also announced that it is working on a policy to flag content from state-controlled media accounts. BuzzFeed reported last month that China-based ByteDance employees were repeatedly able to access non-public data of American users, sparking renewed debate about the security of user data on the platform. Responding to concerns raised by US senators after the BuzzFeed story, Shou Zi Chew, TikTok’s chief executive, acknowledged that employees based in China “may have access to TikTok user data in the US”. It added, however, that access is subject to “robust cybersecurity controls and authorization approval protocols overseen by our US-based security team.” This week, senior politicians from the Chinese-sanctioned Conservative party wrote to the speakers of the House of Commons and the House of Lords asking parliament to take down the new TikTok account. Among the signatories of the letter, according to Politico, were Tom Tugendhat, chairman of the foreign affairs select committee, and Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader. They have been banned from entering China or Hong Kong after repeatedly criticizing China’s treatment of its Uyghur population.
