The injunction comes from the White House Office of Management and Budget. US federal agencies will have to clear their devices of the TikTok videos app within thirty days.
Owned by Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok has been targeted by US lawmakers who view the app as a national security threat. Its use on civil servants’ devices had been prohibited in a law passed at the end of December, a law ratified by President Biden in January.
In a memorandum, the director of this office, Shalanda Young, asked government agencies to “ remove and prohibit installations of the application on devices belonging to them or managed by them, and of ban internet traffic from these devices to the app.
The ban does not apply to non-federal US entities or the millions of individuals who use TikTok.
The Civil Liberties Union deplores this decision.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) believes that this new law amounts to a de facto ban on TikTok.
” Congress must not censor entire platforms and deny Americans 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 in the country and around the world “, she added.
This platform of short and viral videos, very popular with young people, is the target of Westerners who fear that Beijing could thus access the data of users around the world.
Proliferation of prohibitions
The ban in the US federal government comes days after a similar decision of the European Commissionwhich on February 23 banned TikTok from its staff to “protect” the institution.
The Government of Canada also announced on Monday that it was banning TikTok from mobile devices. that it provides to its staff as of this Tuesday, citing “an unacceptable level of risk” to 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.
(with agencies)