According to a spokesman for the application, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, TikTok considers the ban to be “political theater” and regrets that “this measure is replicated by other governments around the world”.
On Monday night, the White House ordered federal institutions to ensure that TikTok was not on their employees’ smartphones within 30 days, pursuant to a law that President Joe Biden signed into law in early January.
Olivia Dalton, White House deputy press secretary, said the administration would “continue to consider other possible steps … including how to work with Congress on this matter in the future.”
Many US lawmakers view the short video platform as a threat to national security.
Their fear, shared by a growing number of Western governments, that Beijing could gain access to user data around the world through the app is something TikTok has consistently denied.
A House committee on Tuesday will vote on a Republican-backed bill that would give Biden the authority to outright ban TikTok in the United States.
It would then have to be approved by both houses, which could happen since measures against China are one of the few issues that unite conservatives and progressives in Congress.
The civil rights association ACLU was opposed to this law because it considered it “would censor a platform” and “deprive Americans of their constitutional right to freedom of expression”, according to a statement by one of its lawyers, Jenna Leventoff, quoted in a statement. .
For months, TikTok has been awaiting the results of a review by the United States Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS), a government agency that assesses the risk of any foreign investment to the country’s national security.
“The quickest and most effective way to address these concerns (…) is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement we’ve been working on with them for nearly two years,” the spokesperson added, noting that TikTok had already begun implementing several points of the agreement to “secure” the platform in the United States.
The European Commission and the Government of Canada have recently taken similar decisions for their employees’ cell phones.