U.S. President Donald Trump's reelection campaign reportedly pushed ads on Facebook this weekend, accusing Chinese short video app TikTok of spying on Americans, CNN reported on Monday.

Users would be involved in a survey regarding whether the United States should ban the app after clicking the ads' links and signing up with their e-mail, the report said.

Amid increasing tensions between Beijing and Washington, Chinese tech firms, including Huawei and TikTok, have become targets of the Trump administration.

Washington sees TikTok as a threat to its national security due to its Chinese identity, even though TikTok has an American CEO and most of its operations are in the U.S., creating American jobs and paying American taxes.

In early July, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the U.S. is considering banning TikTok in the country, citing security concerns. 

TikTok rejects the accusations. "TikTok is led by an American CEO, with hundreds of employees and key leaders across safety, security, product, and public policy here in the U.S.," a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement following Pompeo's comments.

"We have no higher priority than promoting a safe and secure app experience for our users. We have never provided user data to the Chinese government, nor would we do so if asked."

According to CNN, the Trump campaign's ads refer to a research by a company called Mysk that found earlier this year that TikTok and other apps, including that of some American news organizations, accessed the contents of iPhone users' clipboards, where data on text that is copied is stored.

This could be particularly sensitive as some users copy and paste passwords for different services.

On June 30, TikTok's chief information security officer Roland Cloutier reassured the app users in a blog post, citing "many legitimate reasons" why apps access clipboard data.

"In this case, we had been working to address the problem of spam and incidents where users sometimes post the same comments on hundreds of videos. Our technology allowed us to identify users who were copying comments and placing them over and over in the comment section for different videos. We took this as a signal that the user had an agenda, such as promoting themselves to gain followers, or trolling other users," he wrote.

Despite the fact that data gathered as part of the anti-spam program did not leave users' devices, the company would remove the feature, he said in the blog.

After the ads attack against TikTok, Mysk tweeted Saturday: "Trump campaign is using our clipboard research for a political gain. This is sad." The company noted that it was not only TikTok that had been accessing clipboards.

TikTok accused Facebook of providing a platform for such a political campaign.

"We get that election rhetoric gets heated, which is why we don't accept political ads on our platform. What's more interesting is that Facebook is taking money for a political ad that attacks a competitor just as it's preparing to launch a TikTok copycat," a TikTok spokesperson told CNN.

Facebook announced Friday that it was launching Instagram's video-sharing feature, Reels, in the United States and 50 other countries, as a TikTok competition globally.

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