TIKTOK BANS HIT MORE U.S. STATES AMID MOUNTING SECURITY CONCERNS

Fri 13 January 2023:

Due to cybersecurity concerns, the governors of Wisconsin and North Carolina have signed decrees outlawing TikTok on government-owned devices, following other states and the federal government in doing the same, Reuters reported.

Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin announced on Thursday that he was also banning vendors, goods, and services from additional Chinese firms, including Huawei Technologies, Hikvision, ZTE Corp, Tencent Holdings, the owner of WeChat, and Russia-based Kaspersky Lab, in addition to the Chinese-owned TikTok.

“In the digital age, defending our state’s technology and cybersecurity infrastructure and protecting digital privacy have to be a top priority for us as a state,” Evers said.

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper signed an order directing officials to develop a policy within 14 days that prohibits the use of TikTok, WeChat and “potentially other applications” that present cybersecurity risks on state devices.

More than 20 other states have also banned TikTok, owned by Chinese technology conglomerate ByteDance, from state devices – including Ohio, New Jersey and Arkansas earlier this week.

TikTok said it was “disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok.”

The majority Republican governors who have been pushing to remove TikTok from state-owned smartphones have been joined by the Democratic governors of Wisconsin and North Carolina.

After US FBI Director Christopher Wray claimed in November that TikTok poses risks to national security, calls to ban it on government-owned devices gained momentum.

Wray flagged the threat that the Chinese government could harness the app to influence users or control their devices.

TikTok, which has more than 100 million users, has been trying over three years to reassure Washington that the Communist Party of China or any other organization influenced by Beijing cannot access the personal information of US people or alter its content.

SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES

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