On Thursday, Britain announced an immediate ban on TikTok on public phones. The move was followed by other Western countries that banned the video app, owned by a Chinese company, over security concerns.

“The security of sensitive government information must come first, so today we are banning this app from government devices. The use of other programs for data mining will be kept under control,” Cabinet member Oliver Dowden said, according to Reuters and Agerpres.

The US, Canada, Belgium and the European Commission have already banned the app on official devices. “Restricting the use of TikTok on government devices is a reasonable and proportionate step as advised by our cybersecurity experts,” Dowden said.

Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, said on Thursday it was “disappointed” by the UK’s ban on the app on government devices over security concerns, saying it wanted to be “fact-checked and treated like its competitors”. . .

“We believe these bans are based on fundamentally flawed ideas and are motivated by wider geopolitics in which TikTok and our millions of users in the UK play no part,” a company spokesperson said in a statement. AFP.

China on Thursday urged the United States to stop “unwarranted attacks” on the TikTok app after the U.S. government asked parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in the popular app.

According to the Wall Street Journal and other American publications, the White House issued an ultimatum: if TikTok remains in the hands of the Chinese with ByteDance, the application will be banned in the United States for national security reasons.

In recent years, TikTok has surpassed YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook in “time spent” by American adults on each platform, and is already catching up with Netflix, according to Insider Intelligence.