TikTok Unbanned On Government Phones Despite Security Concerns

The White House (link downloads a PDF to your device) has advised federal employees that they are now able to install the social video platform TikTok onto their work devices, effectively ending a ban that Congress passed in 2022. ByteDance sold TikTok to a U.S.-based joint venture in January to comply with a 2024 law that required foreign adversary-controlled entities to undergo a "qualified divestiture" in order to operate in the United States. The Office of Budget and Management cites Department of Justice (downloads PDF) guidance from July noting that the TikTok divestiture means the 2022 law no longer applies. 

Politico reports that multiple agencies, including the Treasury Department, have opened accounts on the platform since the July guidance, while congressional staff are still prohibited, as the House of Representatives and the Senate passed their own rules. The DOJ guidance from the Office of Legal Counsel also allows individual federal agencies to continue bans at their own discretion, such as for promoting personnel productivity.

Efforts to prohibit the network in the United States date back as far as Donald Trump's first presidency. In 2020, he signed an executive order banning TikTok over concerns of Chinese digital surveillance and censorship of user-submitted videos covering issues such as Uyghur detentions in Xinjiang and democracy protests in Hong Kong – a federal judge turned over that ban later that year. Concerns continued to run high during President Joe Biden's term. In June 2022, BuzzFeed News reported that ByteDance employees accessed the non-public information of U.S. users to fulfill intelligence requests by the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple representatives from ByteDance have denied these claims.

Congress passed the No TikTok on Government Devices Act in December of that year, which Biden signed. In 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress, attempting to assure lawmakers his company was behaving appropriately and taking steps to protect its users. When asked whether ByteDance spied on Americans, Chew responded with the jaw-dropping comment, "I don't think spying is the right way to describe it."