European Commission Cracks Down on TikTok: App Faces Potential Ban in Europe

TikTok is in serious danger, and not just in the United States anymore. This afternoon, the European Commission issued a directive requesting all employees to uninstall TikTok from their corporate devices. The ban also affects employees’ personal devices as long as they are used for work purposes.

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The European Commission says in a statement issued today that the ban has been carried out for security reasons, and also mentions competing social networks, which would also be on its radar.

“This measure aims to protect the Commission against cybersecurity actions and threats that could be exploited by third parties to carry out cyber-attacks against the Commission’s corporate environment. Security developments on other social networking platforms will also be kept under constant review,” the European Commission says in its statement.

The European Commission is the first public body to ban the use of TikTok on official devices after the U.S. House of Representatives did the same late last year, strictly prohibiting its use on any of its staff’s devices.

What motivates all these prohibitions? Fear. Regulatory agencies in different parts of the world fear that TikTok is somehow spying on its users, and then sending the data of its users to the Chinese government (without any evidence so far to corroborate it). A fear that is magnified if we take into account several isolated cases that raised alarm bells, such as the spying of some employees of ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) on American journalists.

At the moment, there are no signs that the social network will be banned at the national level in the United States or in any European country, but today’s warning from the European Commission, in which it also mentions other social networks, is more than enough to suggest that social networks are in the crosshairs of regulators, and that any misstep could mean, in the long term, further regulation or even suspension by the state.