A spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry claimed that the US government’s restrictions on the Chinese-owned video-sharing app TikTok were an abuse of state authority and revealed Washington’s anxieties.
Mao Ning stated at a daily briefing that the US administration “has been straining the notion of national security and abusing state power to crush other countries’ industries.”
“How insecure can the US, the leading nation in the world, be to worry so much about a kid’s favorite app?”
Two-thirds of American teenagers use TikTok, but there are worries in Washington that China could use its legal and regulatory authority to gain user information that is private or to spread false information or narratives that are in its favor.
TikTok has been prohibited from being used on mobile devices provided by the government by Congress and more than half of US states.
Some have also advocated for the ban to be extended to any website or app run by ByteDance, the private Chinese company that owns TikTok and relocated its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. ByteDance owns TikTok.
YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are just a few of the global social media sites and messaging services that China has long restricted.
Beijing and Washington are at war over a wide range of topics, including trade, computer chips, and other technology, national security, Taiwan, and the recent shooting down of a suspected Chinese spy balloon over the US.
Canada said on Monday that it would join the US in banning TikTok from all government-issued mobile devices.
“I suspect that as the government takes the significant step of telling all federal employees that they can no longer use TikTok on their work phones many Canadians from business to private individuals will reflect on the security of their data and perhaps make choices,” Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, said.
The Chief Information Officer of Canada found that TikTok “presents an unacceptable level of danger to privacy and security,” according to Mona Fortier, president of the Canadian Treasury Board.
According to Ms. Fortier, “TikTok’s data collection methods on a mobile device allow significant access to the contents of the phone.”
On Tuesday, the app will be taken off of phones provided by the Canadian government.
Read Also: European Commission Bans TikTok On Official Devices
The executive branch of the European Union announced last week that TikTok has been temporarily removed from employee phones as a security precaution.
TikTok has questioned the bans, claiming that it hasn’t been given the chance to respond to inquiries and that governments are excluding themselves from a network that is adored by millions of people.