Washington DC - A commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is urging the US government to ban the social media platform TikTok.

In an interview with Axios, Commissioner Brendan Carr cited concerns over how the platform and its Chinese owned parent company ByteDance handle the massive amounts of data from users in the US.

The Republican, who is one of five commissioners, told the outlet that there isn't "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it's not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party]."

"I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr also said.

He has been regularly critical of the company, which has over 200 million downloads in the US, and in June, Carr sent letters to Apple and Google requesting they remove TikTok from their stores.

Negotiations are currently taking place between TikTok and the Council on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which oversees national security reviews of foreign companies operating within the country.

While the platform has come under fire in the past for data concerns, TikTok has insisted that US user data is safely stored somewhere outside of China.

TikTok responded in a statement to Axios, arguing that Carr "has no role in the confidential discussions with the US government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner."

"We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the US government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns," the platform added.

In June 2021, President Joe Biden revoked an executive order by his predecessor Donald Trump that sought to ban TikTok and WeChat over foreign security concerns.