Federal and state governments and some universities banned TikTok. ZDNET gives you a catchup on the app’s current status.
The U.S. has had a rocky relationship with TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance.
In 2020, former president Donald Trump proposed ByteDance sell parts of its company to Microsoft. If an American company controlled TikTok, it was presumed the app would be less of a security concern for the U.S. and other countries.
By late last year, the U.S. Congress approved a motion to ban TikTok on all federal government-issued devices. In March this year, President Joe Biden’s White House ordered all federal employees to remove the app from their devices within 30 days. A day later, the European Parliament ordered members from all three of its institutions to delete the app from government devices — and urged members to delete it from their personal devices, too.
More than half of U.S. states have also banned or partially banned TikTok from state-issued government devices. In some states, the governors are eager to propose a nationwide ban on the app. Some public, state-funded universities have also banned the app from being used on university networks.
Recently, Montana became the first U.S. state to ban TikTok on all personal devices, threatening to heavily fine Apple and Google if they keep TikTok available to download in their app marketplaces.
Here’s why those bans are being enforced.
Which countries have banned TikTok on federal devices?
These are the countries that have banned TikTok because they believe the app poses a national security threat. There are other countries that banned the app years ago, but they cite shielding citizens from viewing inappropriate content as their reason for the ban.
Which U.S. states have banned TikTok?
For now, Montana is the only U.S. state to sign legislation into law that would ban TikTok on all personal devices in the state. But many public universities and university systems in the U.S. have banned TikTok from operation on campus Wi-Fi and university-owned devices.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that will prohibit personal devices from accessing TikTok on K-12 public schools’ Wi-Fi networks.
It’s unclear if any states are gearing up to follow Montana’s lead and ban TikTok on every personal device within their state.
