alright, well, we're bringing the final tally of
course before the show ends just before five p.m. Eastern
. But now for one of the top stories that
we've been watching tiptop facing increased scrutiny over allegations,
it may leak data to the chinese government. And
now several states are banning government employees from installing the
popular app on their phones. Cheddar news. Michelle
Castillo is here with the latest Michelle. It's good
to see you. Let's start by just addressing the
states that have put Tiktok so far on this.
No download list. Well, let's start with the
latest news that we're hearing, which is indiana yesterday
sued Tiktok over concerns that data from their users from
indiana state residents was being leaked to the chinese government
. And the other fact is we're seeing that texas
is now banning Tiktok users from using their from texas
. Government officials from using Tiktok on their state issued
phones. And this is a growing list. There's
other states including Maryland, south Carolina, south Dakota
, mostly GOP owns states. And this is all
following. Uh, and as well as Nebraska,
you right remember back in november, we also heard
from the FTC saying that the commissioner saying that he
believes that Tiktok should be banned in the United States
. So just a lot of growing resentment against this
app that some people believe might be actually leaking user
data to chinese officials. So, Michelle Tiktok's responds
part of the story as well. What have we
heard from Tiktok so far? Well, I spoke
to Tiktok spokesperson Jamal Brown and he said that,
you know, there's a lot of misinformation about how
Tiktok data gets sent around other places. One of
the things is while Tiktok says that they um there
is a possibility that chinese employees can access data of
US users, it goes through several levels of security
and protocol and these people are vetted employees of the
company that would really need to access this specific information
for a specific purpose and there's several levels that they
have to go through on top of that. Us
data is usually goes through the oracle cloud that was
something that had been enacted when people had initially drew
on issue with the fact that Tiktok was owned by
a chinese company and Tiktok is making moves to stop
US data from going overseas or going to other regions
. They are working on it, but they do
ensure that US data isn't accessible by Chinese government officials
at all and there is a separation between church and
state. So do regular users, Michelle have similar
security concerns about being on the platform themselves. I
just got data from Cassandra and they said that eight
out of 10 Tiktok users say they rely on the
platform for entertainment. So this is going to be
hard to really slow down the popularity of Tiktok.
The second thing is about 78% of users also rely
on Tiktok for news and information. So this is
quickly becoming a source where people have come to go
to every day for infirm and other content that they
need. So I don't think the regular user really
does have as much concern as a lot of these
government officials, a lot of people really rely on
Tiktok now as one of their major social media platforms
and they're kind of really removed from the drama,
especially younger users. It is important to know where
your data goes online of course, and to be
aware of these issues. But for the most part
, I feel like americans are looking at Tiktok as
more of a place that they want to be and
they're kind of sweeping the other stuff under the rug
. Well, we know that the at Michelle at
Tiktok continues to increase in popularity. The amount of
time spent on it is absolutely mind boggling. And
so do you think that these developments will slow it
down, will lessen its popularity? I don't think
that Tiktok trajectory can be slowed down in the immediate
future. I speak to advertising agencies always. And
a lot of budgets are shifting to Tiktok because of
the reasons I just pointed out entertainment. It's an
entertainment platform. Now, if you look at the
Ad revenue or the revenue, the platform is growing
$4.6 billion, that's up 142% from 2020, um
, they're expected to reach 1.8 billion active users by
2022. This is according to the business of apps
. So the idea really is, there's a lot
of things going that are leading to its momentum,
even though states are banning it from government phones.
And we do see that Indiana lawsuit. I think
the average consumer is still very consumed with Tiktok.
Alright, check the news is senior reporter Michele Castelli
. Oh, Michelle, Thank you.