He CAmerican Congress ha bandit TikTok from everyone the smartphones of the staff and elected deputies to the House of Representatives. The chief of staff forwarded an email requesting the deletion of the app for “high risk due to a variety of security issues“.
TikTok, the American Congress bans the app from the smartphones of staff and elected officials
The ban escalation continues for the ByteDance social app, increasingly disliked by American politicians. In fact, last week in the 1.7 trillion dollar budget, one of the items forbade the use of TikTok on Executive devices. Today another branch of the US government bans the use of social media, as Reuters explains.
The Senate also unanimously approved the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, sponsored by Republican Josh Hawley. Additionally, 19 US universities have banned the app from their campus devices and networks, following their state’s ban.
The American spokesperson for TikTok, Brooke Oberwetterexplained to Engadget his disappointment in seeing that “Congress has decided to ban TikTok from government devices”, a move which he defines as “a political gesture that it has nothing to do with national security interests.”
In recent months, several critics of TikTok in US agencies have called out the risk to national security. FBI Director Chris Wray called it a “Trojan horse for the Communist Party of China”. TikTok has tried to respond to these allegations by routing all US traffic to Oracle’s US servers, promising to erase all data from their servers.
But the recent news of the firing of four employees for obtaining TikTok data of some American citizens, including two reporters, seems to have accelerated the US government’s decisions.
At the moment the rift between the US government and the Chinese social network seems difficult to bridge. We will keep you updated on developments.