The White House told federal agencies on Feb. 27 that they had 30 days to delete the app from government devices. Britain, Canada and the executive arm of the European Union also recently banned the app from official devices.
A House committee two days later backed an even more extreme step, voting to advance legislation that would allow President Biden to ban TikTok from all devices nationwide.
Here’s why the pressure has been ratcheted up on TikTok, which has said that it is used by more than 100 million Americans.
Why are governments banning TikTok?
It all comes down to China.
Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations. They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations for misinformation.
TikTok has long denied such allegations and has tried to distance itself from ByteDance.
Have any countries banned TikTok?
India banned the platform in mid-2020, costing ByteDance one of its biggest markets, as the government cracked down on 59 Chinese-owned apps, claiming that they were secretly transmitting users’ data to servers outside India.
What’s happening with bans in the United States?
Since November, more than two dozen states have banned TikTok on government-issued devices and many colleges — like the University of Texas at Austin, Auburn University, and Boise State University — have blocked it from campus Wi-Fi networks. The app has already been banned for three years on U.S. government devices used by the Army, the Marine Corps, the Air Force and the Coast Guard. But the bans typically don’t extend to personal devices. And students often just switch to cellular data to use the app.