TikTok Braces for European Regulatory Rebuke

If the U.S. forces TikTok to go dark in January—a scenario its lawyers are fighting in federal court—it will fall back on its hundreds of millions of users outside the U.S. who have helped make the short-video app a global phenomenon. But some of those other regions, such as Europe, are becoming more hostile to TikTok.

While EU countries haven’t gone as far as threatening to ban the app, regulators in the 27-country political union have begun investigating how it shares information with China. The results of one of these probes, expected soon, could ignite a debate in Europe about the safety of user data similar to the one that led the U.S. Congress to pass a law requiring TikTok to cut its ties with ByteDance or face a ban.