According to military.com, the United States Army has instructed its soldiers to withdraw from using the social media app TikTok due to cybersecurity threats. Army soldiers can no longer use TikTok on government-owned phones following this decision to ban the app.
Army spokeswoman Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa told the report that "the ban is related to cybersecurity...[TikTok] is considered a cyberthreat. We do not allow it on government phones."
The move comes amidst ongoing worries that the video app owned by Chinese company ByteDance could compromise national security and be used to influence or surveil American citizens.
The ban is not the first case of such government action. In December, both the Navy and Defense Department sounded alarms on TikTok. The Navy previously told its members not to download the app, and to delete it from government-issued devices if it was already installed. The Defense Department also instructed employees to "be wary of applications you download, monitor your phones for unusual and unsolicited texts etc., and delete them immediately and uninstall TikTok to circumvent any exposure of personal information."
In fact, the U.S. government scrutiny of the popular Chinese app has been building for months.
In October, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton called on the U.S. intelligence community to assess TikTok's national security risks, while Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio accused TikTok of censoring content related to protests in Hong Kong.
TikTok responded in an October statement that it hasn't removed content because it was asked to do so by the Chinese government, and would not do so in the future. The company added that it stores its U.S. user data in the U.S. (with a backup in Singapore), so it is not subject to Chinese law.
In November, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism invited TikTok representatives to a hearing titled "How Corporations and Big Tech Leave Our Data Exposed to Criminals, China, and Other Bad Actors." The company declined to attend.
Most recently, ByteDance dismissed a report from Bloomberg on that alleged that it was exploring selling its stake in TikTok following the mounting pressure it's facing in the U.S. ByteDance is currently pre-IPO.