The saga of TikTok and its security issues has taken yet another turn. After news broke that TikTok admittedly spied on journalists a few days ago, US government officials have started to take serious measures against the popular app. First, TikTok was banned on US House of Representatives-issued devices, and now the app will disappear from government devices in the state of Kansas.
Kansas Governor Laura Kelly has announced a ban on TikTok on state government devices due to national security and data mining concerns. Kelly stated that TikTok could make users’ data available to the Chinese Communist Party.
15 other states have already banned the app, but Kansas is among the first Democratic states to implement such a ban. TikTok spokesperson Jamal Brown called the ban “politically motivated” and said it was based on “unfounded falsehoods.”
TikTok is the second most popular domain on the internet right now, after Google. It has grown quickly and now has more users than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat combined. Things might become even bleaker for TikTok users in the US if the proposed bipartisan bill helmed by Marco Rubio, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, passes.
The legislation from both parties is called “Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act)” and Rubio officially stated that “The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok. This isn’t about creative videos; this is about an app collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day.”