The US government has approved an unprecedented ban on the use of TikTok on federal government devices. The restrictions – tucked into a spending bill just days before it was passed by Congress, and signed by Joe Biden on Thursday – add to growing uncertainty about the app’s future in the US amid a crackdown from state and federal lawmakers. Officials say the ban is necessary due to national security concerns about the China-based owner of the app, ByteDance. But it also leaves many questions unanswered. Here’s what you need…
Tag: TikTok
US bans China-based TikTok app on all federal government devices
TikTok has been banned on all federal government devices in the US, with limited exceptions, after Joe Biden signed a $1.7tn (£1.4tn) spending bill on Thursday containing a provision that outlaws the China-based app over growing security concerns. The ban – which was approved by Congress in a vote last week – is a major step targeting the fastest-growing social media platform in the world as opponents express worry user data stored in China could be accessed by the government. Various government agencies will develop rules for implementing the ban…
TikTok banned on devices issued by US House of Representatives
TikTok has been banned from any devices issued by the US House of Representatives, as political pressure continues to build on the Chinese-owned social video app. The order to delete the app was issued by Catherine Szpindor, the chief administrative officer (CAO) of the House, whose office had warned in August that the app represented a “high risk to users”. According to a memo obtained by NBC News, all lawmakers and staffers with House-issued mobile phones have been ordered to remove TikTok by Szpindor. “House staff are NOT allowed to…
TikTok’s parent company fires four workers for improper access of user data
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of popular video app TikTok, said on Thursday that some employees improperly accessed TikTok user data of two journalists and were no longer employed by the company, an email seen by Reuters shows. ByteDance employees accessed the data as part of an unsuccessful effort to investigate leaks of company information earlier this year, and were aiming to identify potential connections between two journalists, a former BuzzFeed reporter and a Financial Times reporter, and company employees, the email from ByteDance general counsel Erich Andersen said. The…
South Dakota bans TikTok access on state-owned devices citing ties to China
Kristi Noem, governor of South Dakota, on Tuesday issued an executive order banning state employees and contractors from accessing the video platform TikTok on state-owned devices, citing its ties to China. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. It has been targeted by Republicans who say the Chinese government could access user data such as browsing history and location. US armed forces also have prohibited the app on military devices. TikTok, which has exploded in popularity with a nearly addictive scroll…
Babel: the BookTok sensation that melds dark academia with a post-colonial critique
A boy lies still beside the body of his mother. Her skin is blue and her eyes are open, wet and glassy. It is 1828, and a cholera epidemic has swept through Canton, China. The boy is the only one left alive in the house and is on the brink of death when a quiet white Englishman brings him to London. There, the young Chinese boy is named Robert Swift and grows up in solitude, trained in English, Latin, ancient Greek and Chinese. For what reason, he does not yet…
TechScape: suspicious of TikTok? You’re not alone
What’s the problem with TikTok? It’s a harder question to answer than it seems. The social video app, which has joined Facebook/Instagram, YouTube and Twitter in the list of societally important social networks, is frequently spoken about with an air of suspicion, and it’s not hard to guess why: the app’s Chinese roots loom large in the conversation. (ByteDance, which owns TikTok, insists that it is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, one of the only instances I’ve seen of a company deciding that loudly proclaiming its paper HQ is located…
How TikTok is turning a generation of video addicts into a data goldmine
Question: what do men and Excel have in common? Answer: they’re always automatically turning things into dates when they’re not. To younger people – that is, anyone under the age of 20 – Microsoft’s spreadsheet program, a tool as essential to accountants as saws are to carpenters, is the contemporary equivalent of mom jeans, handwritten thank-you notes and cravats: stuff that oldies care about. How come, then, that the hashtag #excel has had 3.4bn views on a certain social media platform and that one Excel expert on that platform has…
TikTok moves to ease fears amid report workers in China accessed US users’ data
TikTok has said that Oracle will store all the data from its US users, in a bid to allay fears about its safety in the hands of a platform owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The move comes as a report from BuzzFeed news, citing leaked audio from TikTok in-house meetings, said ByteDance employees in China have repeatedly accessed private information about US TikTok users. The popular video snippet sharing service has fended off concerns about the ability of engineers in China to access information about US users that isn’t…
The rise of TikTok: why Facebook is worried about the booming social app
TikTok is on track to overtake the global advertising scale of Twitter and Snapchat combined this year, and to match mighty YouTube within two years, as trendsetting teens and young adults make it the hottest social app of the moment – and Facebook is worried. The Chinese-owned video-sharing platform is forecast to catch up with YouTube by 2024 when both are predicted to take $23.6bn (£18.2bn) in ad revenue, despite TikTok being launched globally 12 years after its Google-owned rival. Helped by unparalleled moments of cool at the height of…