Administrators in the US Congress sent an email on Tuesday instructing all lawmakers and staff to uninstall the TikTok app from any official phones, calling it a security risk.
TikTok has been banned on US government devices as part of a $1.7 trillion spending bill passed last week.
"The Office of Cybersecurity has deemed the TikTok mobile app a high risk to users due to a number of security vulnerabilities", the email from the Congressional Administration Committee states.
According to the email, staff must remove the app from any Congress-issued device and are prohibited from reinstalling it. The change comes after the 117th Congress completed its work and dissolved. The 118th Congress is scheduled to be sworn in next Tuesday.
Among the last things that US lawmakers did in 2022 was pass the 'omnibus' spending bill, which included a ban on installing TikTok on any government device.
Some lawmakers wanted to go further and ban the app in the US altogether. Senator Marco Rubio and Congressman Mike Gallagher, Republicans of Florida and Wisconsin respectively, introduced a bill, describing TikTok as a way for the Chinese government to spy on Americans. A spokesperson for the company described it as "a politically motivated ban that will do nothing to advance US national security."
A week after Rubio and Gallagher proposed banning them, TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, admitted that four employees had used the app to spy on two Americans, journalists at the Financial Times and BuzzFeed News. One U.S.-based executive and one Chinese executive lost their jobs as a result.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said he was 'disappointed' with employees and that the company takes data security 'extremely seriously'.
TikTok is the international version of Douyin, a Chinese social media platform that allows users to upload short videos. The two share the same user interface, but they don’t have access to each other’s content. ByteDance says TikTok has over 1.5 billion accounts, at least a billion of which are monthly active users.
