Business

TikTok Fighting Back Against Potential US Ban With Canadian Tie-Up

A week before a judge in the U.S. decides whether or not the government will be able to ban downloads of its app through U.S. based app stores, the Chinese owned company is expanding.

The company earlier today announced a tie-up with Shopify, a Canadian online retail site, in a bid to work with sellers by making promotional video ads.

And in reports online, TikTok is now saying it intends to hire up to 3,000 staff over the course of the next three years.

In September TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, announced plans to use Singapore as its South East Asian headquarters with investments of billions of dollars to follow.

It is understood TikTok’s parent company, the China based ByteDance will hire the majority of the new staff at facilities in Canada, Singapore, and in the European Union.

The company hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons earlier this year when the U.S. government said Chinese based and owned social media firms including TikTok were a national security threat, as data collected by the company could be accessed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party.

Shopify said of the announcement that it will allow all those selling items by way of the platform the chance to do so using “shoppable video ads” in a format that will, ironically perhaps, first be launched in the U.S.

Plans to expand the Shopify services to include European and South East Asian markets are underway with talk of early 2021 as a roll out date.

Mark Buckton

Mark is a journalism vet of 20 years with most of those years spent in Tokyo, Japan, as a columnist for The Japan Times and numerous other publications. His work has appeared on CNN, in the BBC, NPR, and in several dozen other media forms and publications across five continents.