After renewed allegations of espionage, Tiktok in the USA continues to come under pressure. In addition to the House of Representatives, numerous state governments also ban the app on official devices.
House of Representatives employees must delete Tiktok from their office devices.
The US House of Representatives has banned the video app Tiktok from the Chinese group Bytedance on all official devices in the Congress Chamber. The app is classified as high-risk “due to a number of security issues,” the House of Representatives chief executive wrote in a message to all MPs and staff on Tuesday. It must therefore now be deleted from all devices. Future downloads of the app are prohibited.
The new rule follows a series of measures by state governments to ban Tiktok from devices in their administrations. As of last week, 19 states have at least partially banned the app from state-managed devices over concerns the Chinese government could use the app to monitor Americans and censor content.
The US government is also following suit
With their rules, the House of Representatives and the states are mimicking a law that will soon come into force that will ban the app on US government devices. The $1.66 trillion budget bill passed last week includes a provision banning the app on government-managed devices and will go into effect once President Joe Biden signs the law into law.
Bytedance has long defended itself against allegations of using Tiktok to spy on American citizens. “We do not pass on any information to the Chinese government,” said a Tiktok representative in October 2021 before the US Congress. American users’ data would be stored on servers in the US and backed up in Singapore. The man said under oath that access to the data would be granted manages «a world-renowned security team in the USA».
Research revealed espionage
At least this statement later turned out to be false. This is confirmed by a search by the portal «Buzzfeed News» from mid-June, drawing on more than eighty audio recordings of internal Tiktok sessions. Accordingly, in several cases employees in the US had to contact colleagues in China to understand how data from American users was flowing. American employees would have had neither the permission nor the knowledge to access the data themselves.
Buzzfeed News also wrote that Bytedance employees in China regularly accessed non-public data from American users. A security officer from Tiktok is said to have said: “Everything is seen in China.” Another employee described an engineer working from Beijing as a “master admin” who had “access to everything”.
A few days ago, research by Forbes magazine revealed that the location of several journalists involved in the research had been spied out by Bytedance employees via the app. By looking at the journalists’ location data, Tiktok hoped to find internal moles, according to “Forbes”.
Trump already wanted to ban Tiktok
The fact that Tiktok is under a lot of pressure in the USA is also due to lobbying by competitors such as Meta. They are lobbying Congress to have Tiktok banned in the United States because the app collects too much data about American consumers and thus poses a threat to national security.
As early as 2020, then US President Donald Trump tried to enforce a general ban on Tiktok. This ultimately did not happen because Tiktok appealed and Trump was voted out.
The executive order Trump wrote at the time said Tiktok’s mass collection of user data could “give the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” Experts always point out that Chinese laws on national security, for example, oblige every Chinese to cooperate with the authorities, including the employees of Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance in Beijing.
In mid-December, US lawmakers introduced several bills that would envisage a nationwide ban on Tiktok and other social networks that are under strong foreign influence or whose main purpose is to spy on users. Tiktok has already been banned in India for similar reasons. The competent American supervisory authority FCC (Federal Communications Commission) recently agreed with this assessment.