Will this be the end of TikTok in Portugal? – Money

Four years after Donald Trump suggested banning TikTok in the United States, the saga continues.

After on Saturday, April 20, the US House of Representatives approved a bill that intends to remove the social network from the country, this Wednesday it was the document’s turn to get the “green light” from the Senate. In the United States, the idea of ​​banning the social network from application stores such as the App Store or Play Store is getting closer and closer to being put into practice, and will soon begin to count down, if the controller of the ByteDance platform does not find a buyer trusted by North Americans, but in Europe, the idea is not left behind either.

Due to the possible dependence that the platform can cause, as well as mental health problems, the European Commission decided to issue an ultimatum and open an investigation…but into the new version of the social network: TikTok Lite.

“Unless TikTok provides convincing evidence of its security (…), we are ready to activate (…), measures including the suspension of TikTok Lite functions, which we suspect could lead to addiction,” said the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, cited by news agencies.

The platform thus has until April 26th to present a response to the European Commission – which it has already said it would do -, but the European body still guarantees that if it were to suspend the functionality of the Chinese social network, that suspension could happen this Thursday, the 25th. If this measure comes into force, only two European countries will be affected, including Portugal.

These are Spain and France, where the new version of the application was launched in March this year for people over 18. Here, according to the French newspaper Le Monde, users can earn 1 euro per day if they stay on the platform for at least 1 hour.

Whether it is due to the European Commission’s investigation or not, the truth is that the platform has already admitted that it does not plan to launch the new version in other European countries.