The US government’s ban on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok shows Washington’s own insecurity and is an abuse of state power, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said Tuesday.
The US government “has been overstretching the concept of national security and abusing state power to suppress other state-owned enterprises,” Mao Ning said at a daily briefing. “Isn’t it sure that the US, the world’s top superpower, is afraid of the young people’s favorite app?”
TikTok is used by two-thirds of American teenagers, but there are concerns in Washington that China could use legal and regulatory powers to obtain private user data or try to push misinformation or a narrative that favors China.
Congress and more than half of US states have banned TikTok from government-issued mobile devices.
Some have also moved to apply the ban to any apps or websites owned by ByteDance Ltd., the private Chinese company that owns TikTok that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020.
China has long blocked a long list of foreign social media platforms and messaging apps, including YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
Washington and Beijing are at odds over many issues including trade, computer chips and other technology, national security and Taiwan, along with the discovery of a suspected Chinese spy balloon in the US and shot down earlier this month.
On Monday, Canada announced it was joining the US in banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices.
“I suspect that if the government takes the important step of telling all federal employees that they can’t use TikTok on their work phones, many Canadians from business to personal will reflect on their own data security and maybe make a choice,” Trudeau said. .
Treasury Board of Canada President Mona Fortier said Canada’s Chief Information Officer has determined that TikTok “presents an unacceptable level of risk to privacy and security.”
“On mobile devices, TikTok’s data collection method provides a lot of access to phone content,” Fortier said.
The app will be removed from the phone issued by the Canadian government on Tuesday.
The European Union’s executive branch said last week it had temporarily banned TikTok from phones used by employees as a cybersecurity measure.
TikTok has questioned the ban, saying it hasn’t been given a chance to answer questions and that the government is removing itself from a platform loved by millions.
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