Australia will ban TikTok on government phones this week, following other countries in doing so due to security concerns, according to Australian newspapers late Monday.
Following the completion of a review by the Home Affairs department, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese agreed to a government-wide ban on the use of TikTok, according to The Australian newspaper.
The short video app will also be banned from government phones in Victoria, according to The Age, citing a state government official who said Victoria would follow the federal government’s lead.
Also read: TikTok revised policies amidst the growing fear of the US ban
The app has already been banned from official devices in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, and the European Commission due to security concerns.
TikTok has come under increased scrutiny as a result of concerns that user data from the app, which is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance, could end up in the hands of the Chinese government, undermining Western security interests.
According to The Age, Tiktok Australia general manager Lee Hunter stated that the company was disappointed to learn of the ban through the media “despite our repeated offers to engage with government constructively about this policy.”
“We stress that there is no evidence to suggest that TikTok is in any way a security risk to Australians and should not be treated differently to other social media platforms,” he was quoted as saying.
TikTok, and its Chinese counterpart Douyin, is a short-form video hosting service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. It hosts user-submitted videos, which can range in duration from 3 seconds to 10 minutes.
Since their launches, TikTok and Douyin have gained global popularity. In October 2020, TikTok surpassed 2 billion mobile downloads worldwide. Morning Consult named TikTok the third-fastest growing brand of 2020, after Zoom and Peacock. Cloudflare ranked TikTok the most popular website of 2021, surpassing google.com.
