The biggest concern is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company,
TikTok use harms children's mental health
In March 2022, eight states, including California and Massachusetts, launched an investigation into whether TikTok causes physical or mental health harm to young people and what the company knew about its role in those harms.
For now, Montana is the only U.S. state to sign legislation into law that would ban TikTok on all personal devices in the state. But many public universities and university systems in the U.S. have banned TikTok from operation on campus Wi-Fi and university-owned devices.
Have any countries banned TikTok? India banned the platform in mid-2020, costing ByteDance one of its biggest markets, as the government cracked down on 59 Chinese-owned apps, claiming that they were secretly transmitting users' data to servers outside India.
Montana Governor Greg Gianforte on Wednesday signed legislation to ban Chinese-owned TikTok from operating in the state to protect residents from alleged intelligence gathering by China, making it the first U.S. state to ban the popular short video app.
Fact: TikTok's parent company ByteDance Ltd. was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs, but today, roughly sixty percent of the company is beneficially owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group.
Montana is set to become the first US state to ban Chinese-owned media giant TikTok from personal devices. Governor Greg Gianforte signed the ban into law on Wednesday.
TikTok is also blocked in Iran and North Korea, but both these countries have highly censored internet, so it is not necessarily a TikTok-specific ban. Which countries have banned partially banned TikTok? The US voted to ban TikTok from federal government…
West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution Center for Technology Innovation. The app could lose functionality over time. “If there's a ban, there would definitely be no more updates and software enhancements, and over time, it becomes harder to use those apps,” West said.
A TikTok ban would cause further harms. It would undermine information security if, for example, legacy TikTok users could not receive updates to patch vulnerabilities. A ban would further entrench the social media market share of a small number of massive companies.
April, 14, 2023: Montana becomes the first state to approve a full, state-wide ban on TikTok. According to NPR, the ban would not go into effect until January 2024 if it was actually enacted. Some critics feel that Montana's ban is largely performative and would be impossible to enforce.
Social media app TikTok has been banned on government electronic devices, the Cabinet Office has announced today. The ban comes after Cabinet Office Ministers ordered a security review.
The platform has 150 million American users but it's been dogged by persistent claims that it threatens national security and user privacy, or could be used to promote pro-Beijing propaganda and misinformation. Chew attempted to persuade lawmakers not to pursue a ban on the app or force its sale to new owners.
TikTok is fighting to stay alive in the United States as pressure builds in Washington to ban the app if its Chinese owners don't sell the company. But the wildly popular platform, developed with homegrown Chinese technology, isn't accessible in China.
Citing national security concerns, India in 2020 banned the use of TikTok and dozens of other apps developed by Chinese companies. The US has prohibited downloading or using TikTok on federal government devices; the UK, Canada, Belgium and Taiwan, have enacted similar bans.
But it is possible to be banned from TikTok, which can be a frustrating thing to go through. Some bans are short-term, but others are permanent, which means you'll never be able to get back into your account.
TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin (Chinese: 抖音; pinyin: Dǒuyīn), is a short-form video hosting service owned by ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.
In Japan, the use of TikTok and other social networking services (SNSs) are prohibited on government devices that handle confidential information. Nakayama said further restrictions should be considered only after looking into their data-handling and other operations.
Many countries have banned or temporarily limited access to Facebook. Use of the website has also been restricted in various ways in other countries. As of July 2022, the only countries to continually ban access to the social networking site are North Korea, Myanmar, Russia, Syria, Turkey, and Uganda.
Internet censorship and surveillance has been tightly implemented in China that block social websites like Gmail, Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others. The excessive censorship practices of the Great Firewall of China have now engulfed the VPN service providers as well.
Is TikTok safe? It's as safe as just about any other social media platform. It doesn't infect your phone with malware, but it comes with some safety risks like scams and saved user data.
Zhang Yiming is the main founder of Chinese tech giant ByteDance, best known for its insanely popular app TikTok, which has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Zhang stepped down as chairman of ByteDance in November 2021 after resigning as CEO in May that year, reportedly under pressure from the Chinese government.
Underage ban
An underage ban is a potentially permanent ban that can lead to account deletion after 113 days.