BATON ROUGE, La. (WAFB) – The popular social media app TikTok has the attention of lawmakers across the country, even on Capitol Hill.
Concerns over national security have congressional members wanting to ban the app on government-issued devices. Now leaders in Louisiana are making similar moves on their own.
With the concern of personal and private data being exposed, Louisiana Secretary of State, Kyle Ardoin, plans to ban the app TikTok for all devices issued by the state department.
Officials with the state department say the FBI believes TikTok poses a national security threat, adding the data collected by the Chinese-owned software can be manipulated or used to manipulate its users.
In Washington, the U.S. House of Representatives has done the same thing for all of its staff.
One Louisiana lawmaker wants to take it a step further. State Representative Daryl Deshotel is a Republican from Marksville who plans to bring up legislation, when session starts in April, to ban TikTok on all state employee devices.
Secretary of State Ardoin has also called on Governor John Bel Edwards to follow his ban statewide. He has yet to make an official decision, we reached out to the governor’s office for comment as well but did not hear back.
It should be noted Louisiana is not the only state that’s looking to do this. Other states like Georgia and New Hampshire have already implemented statewide bans on the app for all of their state government employees.
TikTok responded to our request for a statement saying,
“We’re disappointed that so many states are jumping on the political bandwagon to enact policies that will do nothing to advance cybersecurity in their states and are based on unfounded falsehoods about TikTok.
TikTok is loved by millions of Americans, and it is unfortunate that the many state agencies, offices, universities, student groups, and sports teams in those states will no longer be able to use TikTok to build communities and share information. We are continuing to work with the federal government to finalize a solution that will meaningfully address any security concerns that have been raised at the federal and state level.
These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them.”
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