US 'may be banning' TikTok, says President Donald Trump

US President Donald Trump on Friday (local time) said that his administration may ban the Chinese video-sharing application TikTok.

"We are looking at TikTok, we may be banning TikTok. We may be doing some other things, we have a couple of options... But we are looking at a lot of alternatives with respect to TikTok," the US President said.

This comes after President Donald Trump told reporters on Wednesday that the US government is thinking about imposing a ban on TikTok. "We are looking at TikTok," Trump said when asked about possibly banning the Chinese application. "We are thinking about making a decision."

Earlier in July, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Trump administration was considering a ban on access to the TikTok application over privacy concerns.

The US politicians have repeatedly criticised TikTok, owned by Beijing-based startup ByteDance, of being a threat to national security because of its ties to China.

Earlier this month, expressing concern over TikTok's censorship of user content to advance the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) foreign policy aims, a set of 25 US Congressmen and Congresswomen urged President Donald

Trump to "take decisive action to protect the American people's privacy and safety".

India had recently banned 59 Chinese mobile applications including the widely-used social media platforms such as TikTok, WeChat, and Helo with a view of the threat to the nation's sovereignty and security.

The majority of the apps banned in the June 29 order were red-flagged by intelligence agencies over concerns that they were collecting user data and possibly also sending them "outside". 

(With ANI inputs)