U.S. federal agencies must clear their devices of the TikTok video app within 30 days, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ordered 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, called on government agencies to “remove and prohibit installations” of the application on devices owned or managed by them, and to “prohibit 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.
But the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) deplored the new law, saying it amounted to “effectively banning TikTok”.
“Congress must not censor entire platforms and deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech and expression,” Jenna Leventoff, senior policy adviser for the ACLU, said 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.
“Unreasonable”
The ultra-popular platform of short and viral videos is increasingly scrutinized by some Western countries who fear that Beijing could thus access the data of users around the world.
Neither TikTok nor ByteDance reacted immediately to the White House announcement.
“The United States is the largest country in the world and they fear an application popular with young people. It’s really a lack of self-confidence, “said Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Tuesday.
“We strongly oppose such behavior by the United States of overextending the concept of national security, abusing state power, and unreasonably targeting businesses in other countries,” she said during a regular press briefing.
Denmark follows suit
The ban in the US federal government comes days after a similar decision by the European Commission, which banned TikTok from its staff to “protect” the institution.
The Government of Canada also announced Monday that it will ban TikTok from the mobile devices it provides to its staff starting Tuesday, citing “an unacceptable level of risk” to privacy and security.
The Danish Parliament also announced on Tuesday that it had asked MPs and all of its staff to ban the application from the mobile devices it provides because of the “risk of espionage”.
The announcement follows recommendations from the Danish Cybersecurity Center strongly advising public officials to remove TikTok from their phones after the ban decided by the European Commission.
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.