Britain’s parliament has killed its own TikTok account merely days after it was launched over fears the platform leaks data to China.
After receiving warnings from a number of MPs about the China-linked social media platform’s security issues, the UK Parliament has decided to kill its own short-lived TikTok account.
Described by a spokesman as an attempt to reach younger audiences, the account of the social media platform was launched only last week on a trial basis.
However, POLITICO reports this same spokesman as saying that this trial run has now been pulled early after “feedback” was received from members of parliament, a number of whom penned a letter to house speakers asking them to pull the account until assurances can be arranged that no user data is being leaked to Communist China.
“Data security risks associated with the app are considerable,” the letter penned by a number of MPs — some of whom have been sanctioned by the Chinese Communist Party — read.
“This issue led to the United States Government to restrict use of the app in 2020,” it continued. “Only last month, US Senators requested a further security review, in light of additional security vulnerabilities.”
“While efforts made to engage young people in the history and functioning of Parliament should always to be welcomed (sic), we cannot and should not legitimise the use of an app which has been described by tech experts as ‘essentially Chinese Government spyware’.”
The security worries over Tiktok are no concern for the UK’s left-globalist Labour Party, however, which ordered its Parliamentarians to join Tiktok last year to claim their names, a bid to prevent imposter or parody accounts.
Ian Duncan Smith, one of the MPs who signed the original letter given to parliament, has since told The Telegraph that he approves of the decision to remove the account, describing the social media giant as “data harvesters for the Chinese government.”
With President Trump’s United States mulling the possibility of banning the platform back in 2020, pressure has only mounted on the CCP-linked platform after it was confirmed that China-based employees of the platform’s owner Bytedance could access the user date of westerners.
This latest controversy surrounding the platform has appeared to have woken up politicians in the UK as to the dangers of allowing the platform to operate domestically, with Conservative Party officials traditionally being very lax when it comes to dealing with Chinese tech giants.
Even Liz Truss, one of the candidates to become the next Tory Party leader and — by extension — Prime Minister, appears to have recognised that public sentiment on China is turning, with the former-Liberal Democrat saying that the UK “absolutely should be cracking down on those types of companies [Tik Tok] and we should be limiting the number of tech exports we do to authoritarian regimes”.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric does not necessarily mean that Truss would actually take action if elected PM, with authorities in the UK at the moment continuing to allow Chinese dominance in domestic tech and universities, despite fiery statements becoming ever more frequent on the issues.