TikTok: why the United States, Canada and the European Commission have banned the app on their official phones

First it was the United States and the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, and now Canada has joined.

The officials will no longer be able to use TikTok on their official devices due to doubts about the popular Chinese video app among Western governments.

Taiwan also doesn’t allow its officials to use it, and India completely banned the app in the country in 2020, following a geopolitical dispute with China.

Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran also censor the app, but because they believe it conflicts with their social values.

why are they suspicious

TikTok is a video app from the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd. which is extremely popular, especially among younger users.

The application has experienced explosive growth in recent years, becoming the first app not owned by Meta (which owns Facebook or Instagram) to reach 3 billion global downloads, according to analytics company Sensor Tower Data.

However, the company has been accused of collecting data from its users and handing it over to the Chinese government.

According to a cybersecurity study published in July 2022 by Internet 2.0, an Australian company, the app conducts “excessive data collection”. The researchers studied the application’s source code and made sure it collected data such as users’ location, which terminal they used, and what other applications were on the device.

To its critics, TikTok is a kind of “Trojan horse” that, while seemingly harmless, could become a powerful weapon in times of conflict.

What measures have been taken

The Canadian government has banned its employees from using it since Tuesday, saying it causes the application to pose “an unacceptable risk to privacy and security”.

The Canadian regulator is looking into what TikTok does with user data, specifically whether the company gets “valid and meaningful” consent when it collects personal information.

“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide significant access to phone content,” Mona Fortier, chair of the Treasury Board of Canada, which oversees government spending, said in a statement.

While “the risks of using the application are clear,” the official assured that at this time they have no evidence that government information has been compromised.

EU spokeswoman Sonya Gospodinova said in Brussels that in the case of the European Commission, the measure aims “to protect the Commission against cybersecurity threats and actions that can be exploited for cyber-attacks against the corporate environment” of the same.

The ban in the EU, which will take effect on March 15, also covers phones or personal devices with official applications installed, such as Commission email or messaging programs such as Skype for Business.

At the end of the year, the US federal government banned its officials from using TikTok and has now given other government agencies 30 days to remove the app from their systems. Several American universities have done the same.

Already in 2020 the administration of the then president Donald Trump tried to ban the app nationwide. However, due to numerous legal challenges, this debate fizzled out in 2021, when incumbent President Joe Biden turned down Trump’s proposal.

What TikTok says

Tik Tok emphasizes that it works no different than other social networks.

While the Internet 2.0 study is often cited, Citizen Lab conducted another similar test that concluded that “Compared to other popular social media platforms, TikTok collects the same type of data to track user behavior.”

A similar conclusion was reached by the Georgia Institute of Technology, which noted in January that “the main problem here is that other social networking sites and mobile apps are doing the same thing.”

The company also ensures that the Chinese government cannot access user data and that the Chinese version of the application is different from the rest of the world.

However, last December ByteDance admitted that several of its Beijing employees had access to the data of at least two journalists. Americans and a “small number” of others to track their locations and see if they met TikTok employees who they suspected had leaked information about the company to the media.

According to the company, those employees who had access to the data were fired in December.

TikTok is also in talks with the US government to store all user data in the US instead of China. In addition, it has ensured that all American data has been routed through servers in the American country since last summer.

Is there censorship on TikTok?

In November 2022, the director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) assured that “the Chinese government (…) could control the recommendations of the algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”

In other words, Beijing could try to manipulate TikTok users through the publications the application recommends.

Adding to these concerns is the fact that TikTok’s sister app, douyinwhich is only available in China, is heavily censored and is apparently designed to encourage wholesome and educational material to go viral.

Citizen Lab researchers compared TikTok and Douyin and concluded that TikTok does not practice the same political censorship.

“The platform does not impose clear postal censorship,” the researchers said.

At the Georgia Institute of Technology they also found no major traces of censorship. The analysts looked for topics like Taiwanese independence or jokes about Chinese Prime Minister Xi Jinping, and concluded that “videos in all of these categories are easy to find on TikTok. Many are popular and widely shared.”

In China, all social media is heavily censored, with an army of police removing content critical of the government or likely to cause political unrest.

As TikTok started to take off, there were some high-profile instances of censorship, such as when an American user’s account was suspended for speaking out about Beijing’s treatment of Xinjiang Muslims. Following the fierce public backlash, TikTok apologized and reinstated its account.

Since then, there have been few instances of censorship, apart from some controversial moderation decisions, which affect all platforms.

What the Chinese government says

For Beijing, the US – and thus other Western governments – abuses its state power to suppress foreign companies.

“We strongly oppose these wrong actions,” spokeswoman Mao Ning said at a press conference on Tuesday. “The U.S. government must uphold the principles of a market economy and fair competition, stop suppressing business, and provide an open, fair, and non-discriminatory environment for foreign businesses in the U.S.”

“How insecure a world power like the United States must be of itself fear this way the favorite application of young peoplehe added.

However, as Joe Tidy, a cybersecurity reporter for the BBC, points out, the alleged risks, even theoretically, are not reciprocal: “China doesn’t have to worry about US apps because their access to Chinese citizens was blocked many years ago.”