The Chief Administrative Officer of the US House of Representatives announced on Tuesday (July 30th) that all electronic devices in the House will have TikTok (the overseas version of Douyin) deleted and disabled, as well as products owned by ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok.
According to the Congressional Hill, a memo from the Chief Administrative Officer of the House, Catherine Szpindor, stated, “Effective August 15, 2024, the House’s Office of Administration will block and remove all ByteDance products from devices and app stores managed by the House.”
The memo also added, “ByteDance applications will not be allowed on any House device.”
The banned platforms include but are not limited to TikTok, Hypic, Lark, Lemon8, and CapCut.
This is the latest move by the House following the strongest evidence presented by the US Department of Justice last Friday (July 26) that TikTok poses a threat to national security.
The US Department of Justice has accused TikTok of collecting a large amount of sensitive information from American users, including their views on social issues such as gun control, abortion, and religion.
Government lawyers wrote in a filing to the Washington Federal Appeals Court that TikTok collects data on American users’ views on sensitive topics and reviews content under the direction of its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
The filing points out that TikTok and ByteDance use an internal communication system called Lark, through which TikTok employees send a significant amount of restricted data from American users directly to ByteDance engineers in China.
As early as December 2022, Szpindor ordered House staff to refrain from downloading TikTok on House devices and mandated the removal of any downloaded applications. The Office of Cybersecurity deemed the platform “high-risk for users due to numerous security vulnerabilities.”
However, the notice issued on Tuesday goes further than the previous ban, stating, “Starting with mobile devices, ByteDance products will be blocked and removed from devices managed by the House. If your House-managed mobile device has ByteDance applications, we will contact you to have it removed.”
The US is also facing a potential ban on TikTok. President Biden signed a bill in April requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok, otherwise TikTok will face a full ban in the US one year later.