Shares of Snap Inc. rose nearly 8% Tuesday following after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested that the Trump administration was considering banning its chief competitor, the Chinese-owned social video platform TikTok.
Snap stock rose to $25 per share on Tuesday — its highest level since last July, Marketwatch noted. Snap’s previous trading high was roughly $19 per share on February 3.
TikTok, which established an office in Culver City this January, is owned by Beijing-based Bytedance — and has long raised alarms with national security and privacy experts for its ties to the Chinese government.
In a Fox News interview on Monday, Pompeo said the administration was considering an outright ban on apps developed in China. “We are taking this very seriously. We are certainly looking at it,” Pompeo said. The Trump administration has not yet officially banned TikTok, which has proved immensely popular in the United States but also globally. More than 2 billion people worldwide have downloaded TikTok, according to analysts at SensorTower.
The topic of banning Chinese-bred technology in the U.S. because of national security concerns is not entirely new — last December, the U.S. Army barred its soldiers from using TikTok out of security concerns.
The U.S. has also sought to ban technology made by telecom giant Huawei out of fear the Chinese government could use its cellphone technology to spy on U.S. users. Both Huawei and Chinese tech firm ZTE were declared national security threats by the FCC on June 30.
“Whether it was the problems of having Huawei technology in your infrastructure we’ve gone all over the world and we’re making real progress getting that out. We declared ZTE a danger to American national security,” Pompeo told Fox News.