BRUSSELS - Chinese social media company TikTok plans to open two more data centres in Europe, a senior executive said on Friday, a move that could mitigate concerns over the security of users’ data and ease regulatory pressure on the company.

TikTok has been seeking to assure governments and regulators that users’ personal data cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China’s Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.

The short video-sharing app, owned by China’s ByteDance, aims to expand its European data storage, TikTok’s general manager for operations in Europe Rich Waterworth said in a blog post.

“We are at an advanced stage of finalising a plan for a second data centre in Ireland with a third-party service provider, in addition to the site announced last year,” he said.

“We’re also in talks to establish a third data centre in Europe to further complement our planned operations in Ireland. European TikTok user data will begin migrating this year, continuing into 2024,” Mr Waterworth said.

The firm on Friday also reported on average 125 million monthly active users in the European Union between August 2022 and January 2023, subjecting it to stricter EU online content rules known as the Digital Services Act (DSA).

The DSA labels companies with more than 45 million users as very large online platforms and requires them to do risk management, external and independent auditing, share data with the authorities and researchers, and adopt a code of conduct.

The European Commission had given online platforms and search engines until Feb 17 to publish their number of monthly active users. Very large online platforms have four months to comply with the rules or risk fines.

On Friday, Tiktok said it was working hard to comply with EU rules after the bloc’s leaders demanded greater efforts from the firm.

The bloc’s top officials recently accused the platform of failing to deal with problems related to data, copyright and access to harmful content.

In a statement, TikTok said it had bolstered its staff working on compliance, and promised to host the data of European users in Ireland.

The EU is pushing through a suite of regulations to rein in big tech’s power. “With younger audiences comes greater responsibility,” EU commissioner Thierry Breton told TikTok boss Shou Zi Chew in a call in January, according to a readout released by the EU.

“It is not acceptable that behind seemingly fun and harmless features, it takes users seconds to access harmful and sometimes even life-threatening content.”

The firm, which said it has more than 5,000 staff in Europe, promised to continue taking down harmful content and disinformation, and openly report any actions.

TikTok admitted last year that some staff in China could access the data of European users.

It was later forced to confirm that ByteDance staff had accessed TikTok data to track journalists in a bid to identify a source of leaks to the media.

On Thursday, Twitter said it had 100.9 million average monthly users in the EU, based on an estimation of the last 45 days.

Alphabet provided one set of numbers based on users’ accounts and another set based on signed-out recipients, saying that users can access its services whether they sign into an account or are signed out.

It said the average monthly number of signed-in users totalled 278.6 million at Google Maps, 274.6 million at Google Play, 332 million at Google Search, 74.9 million at Shopping and 401.7 million at YouTube.

Earlier this week, Meta Platforms said it had 255 million average monthly active users on Facebook in the EU and about 250 million average monthly active users on Instagram in the last six months of 2022. REUTERS, AFP