Trump campaign runs Facebook advertisements asking if he should ban TikTok

US President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign is running Facebook ads claiming that the Chinese-owned short video app TikTok is spying on users.

The ads link to a survey asking whether TikTok, which is owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, should be banned in the United States. They also ask for respondents' names and contact details.

"TikTok is spying on you,” claimed one ad. “TikTok has been caught red handed by monitoring what is on your phone’s clipboard,” it said.

TikTok is estimated to have close to a billion users worldwide, and has long battled allegations that it is a spying tool for Beijing, pointing out it has an American CEO and consistently denying allegations that it shares user data.

Earlier this month, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States was “certainly looking at” banning Chinese social media apps, including TikTok. India banned TikTok and other Chinese apps in June.

Trump blames China for the coronavirus pandemic, which continues to ravage the US, threatening the American economy and the president's reelection.

Also read: They could have stopped the virus but didn't: Trump lashes out at China again

But he also fell victim to TikTok users, who along with legions of K-pop fans, claimed to have sabotaged Trump's campaign rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma last month by reserving blocks of tickets for the event they had no intention of attending. Trump's campaign boasted it had receive a million ticket requests, but only 6,200 people attended.

TikTok has said that it has never provided user data to China and that it would not do so if asked, and a spokeswoman told Reuters on Monday the company has "no higher priority than promoting a safe app experience that protects our users' privacy.”

Last month, when Apple released to developers a test version of its iOS operating system with new privacy features, developers showed images of TikTok's app triggering notifications that it was copying data from users' clipboards, where data is temporarily stored while copying and pasting from one app to another.

TikTok said the notifications were caused by an anti-spam feature but it ended the practice June 27.

TikTok also hit out at Facebook for running the ads. "Facebook is taking money for a political ad that attacks a competitor just as it's preparing to launch a TikTok copycat,” the spokeswoman said in an email to Reuters.

Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company’s photo-sharing app Instagram will soon be expanding its test of a short video format called Reels to the United States, according to media reports.