Belgium Bans TikTok on Government Devices

On March 10th, a message on the webpage of the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander De Croo, stated that TikTok would be temporarily banned from devices owned or paid for by Belgium’s federal government for at least six months due to concerns over cybersecurity, privacy, and misinformation. As reported, the prohibited APP by Belgium is the overseas version of TikTok, which is owned by the CCP’S company ByteDance. Although TikTok has long claimed that they do not share data with the CCP regime and their data is not stored in Communist China, three major EU institutions and the Danish Ministry of Defense have ordered employees to delete the app from their work devices, following similar action by Canada and U.S. Mr. De Croo said that Belgium’s ban was based on warnings from the state security service and its cybersecurity center, which stated that TikTok could harvest user data and tweak algorithms to manipulate its news feeds and content, and TikTok could be compelled to engage in spying for the CCP.

“We are in a new geopolitical context where influence and surveillance between states have shifted to the digital world,” de Croo said in an online statement, “We must not be naive: TikTok is a Chinese company which today is obliged to cooperate with the intelligence services. This is the reality. Prohibiting its use on federal service devices is common sense.”