White House orders federal agencies to ban TikTok from devices within 30 days – Release

After the staff of the European Commission, the turn of federal employees to be denied access to Tiktok at their workplace. US federal agencies will have to clear their devices of the TikTok video app within 30 days, as ordered by the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) on Monday. .

Owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been targeted by US lawmakers who consider the application a threat to national security, and had banned its use on civil servants’ devices in a law passed in late December. The OMB’s order is taken pursuant to this law, ratified in early January by President Joe Biden.

In a memorandum, the director of this office, Shalanda Young, asked government agencies to “remove and ban installations” application on devices owned or managed by them, and“ban internet traffic” from these devices to the application.

The ban does not apply to non-federal US entities or the millions of individuals who use TikTok. But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) deplored the new law, saying it amounted to “effectively ban TikTok”.

“Congress must not censor entire platforms and deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech and expression”said Jenna Leventoff, the ACLU’s senior policy adviser, in a statement. “We have the right to use TikTok and other platforms to exchange our thoughts, ideas and opinions with people across the country and around the world”she added.

The ultra-popular platform of short and viral videos is increasingly scrutinized by Westerners who fear that Beijing could thus access the data of users around the world. The ban in the US federal government comes days after a similar decision by the European Commission, which banned TikTok to its staff for “protect” l’institution.

The Government of Canada also announced on Monday that it will ban TikTok from the mobile devices it provides to its staff starting Tuesday, citing “an unacceptable level of risk” for privacy and security. TikTok has already been among the Chinese apps banned in India since 2020.

With more than a billion active users worldwide, TikTok is the sixth most used social platform, according to We Are Social’s latest digital evolution report, published in January. TikTok acknowledged in November that some employees in China could access European user data, and admitted in December that employees had used that data to stalk journalists. But the group denies any Chinese government control or access to its data.