China says TikTok ban reflects US insecurities

• The US government’s ban on the Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok.
• TikTok is used by two-thirds of American teenagers.
• China has long blocked a slew of foreign social media and messaging platforms.

BEIJING, China (AP) — The US government’s ban on the Chinese-owned video sharing app TikTok reveals Washington’s own insecurities and is an abuse of state power, according to a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson.

The U.S. government “has been overstretching the concept of national security and abusing state power to suppress other countries’ companies,” Mao Ning said at a daily briefing. “How unsure of itself can the U.S., the world’s top superpower, be to fear a favorite young person’s favorite app to such a degree?”

In guidance issued Monday, the White House gave all federal agencies 30 days to remove TikTok from all government devices. TikTok was already blocked on White House devices.

TikTok is used by two-thirds of American teenagers, but Washington is concerned that China will use its legal and regulatory powers to obtain private user data or to spread misinformation or narratives favourable to China.

TikTok has been banned from government-issued mobile devices by Congress and more than half of U.S. states.

Some have also proposed expanding the ban to include any app or website owned by ByteDance Ltd., the private Chinese company that owns TikTok and relocated its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.

China has long blocked a slew of foreign social media and messaging platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Washington and Beijing are at odds over a variety of issues, including trade, computer chips and other technology, national security, and Taiwan, as well as the discovery and shooting down of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the United States earlier this month.

On Monday, Canada announced that it would join the United States in prohibiting TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices.

“I suspect that as government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their own data and perhaps make choices,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters after the announcement.

Canadian Treasury Board President Mona Fortier said the Chief Information Officer of Canada had determined that TikTok “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”

“On a mobile device, TikTok’s data collection methods provide considerable access to the contents of the phone,” Fortier said.

On Tuesday, the app will be removed from Canadian government-issued phones.

The European Union’s executive branch announced last week that it has temporarily banned TikTok from employee phones as a cybersecurity measure.

TikTok has questioned the bans, claiming that it was not given an opportunity to respond to questions and that governments were cutting themselves off from a popular platform.

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