After TikTok withdrew from India in 2020, Singh has been leading business solutions for the platform in Southeast Asia. His move to the North American market comes at a time when TikTok is being heavily scrutinised by the American government and amid widespread calls for a blanket ban on it, much like India did.
As per his LinkedIn profile, Singh took over in his current role in January this year, after being the head of global business solutions, Asia Pacific for TikTok from July 2021.
Prior to joining ByteDance, Singh spearheaded the operations at GroupM as its chief executive officer, South Asia. He had also held leadership positions at Google, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble and IPG in the US, UK, UAE and China.
Experts ET spoke with said Singh has an uphill task ahead of him as North America is an extremely critical market for the popular short-video sharing platform that has come under a lot of scrutiny recently.
Earlier this month, ET reported Brendan Carr, commissioner of the United States Federal Communications Commission, as saying that “banning TikTok is a natural next step in our efforts to secure communication networks … It (TikTok) operates as a sophisticated surveillance tool and that presents a serious national security threat. All of the sensitive and non-public data is going to Beijing and could be used for blackmail, espionage, foreign influence campaigns and surveillance”.
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Several US states have banned the app on government-owned devices, while the state of Indiana has sued TikTok for inflicting harm on residents. In December, a bipartisan Bill seeking an outright ban on the app was introduced into both houses of US Congress by Senator Marco Rubio.While there are talks of “mitigating measures” being put in place, Carr said he doesn’t see “anything other than a blanket ban” working.
The White House and the US defence, homeland security and state departments have already banned TikTok. In December, Catherine Szpindor, the chief administrator of the House of Representatives, instructed all staff and lawmakers to delete TikTok from their devices.
Carr said that at least 20 of the 50 American states have banned TikTok on state government devices with the number due to increase in 2023. Nebraska was the first state to issue a ban in 2020. Several predominantly Republican-led states – including Texas, South Dakota and Virginia – have also banned the use of the Chinese app.
India banned TikTok and nearly 300 other Chinese apps in phases starting June 2020 over national security concerns. TikTok had more than 200 million users in India at the time and considered India as its biggest overseas market.
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