The US Army has banned service members from using the Chinese-owned short-form video app TikTok on government-issued phones. The decision, first reported by Military.com, comes only weeks after the Navy announced a similar ban.
“It is considered a cyber threat,” Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa, an Army spokesperson, told Military.com. “We do not allow it on government phones.”
US government scrutiny of the Chinese app has been building for months. In October, New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton called on the US intelligence community to assess TikTok’s national security risks, while Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio accused TikTok of censoring content related to protests in Hong Kong. In November, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism invited TikTok representatives to a hearing titled “How Corporations and Big Tech Leave Our Data Exposed to Criminals, China, and Other Bad Actors.” The company declined to attend.
Still, the platform was so popular within the US military that the Army was using the app as a recruitment tool as recently as November.
“There was a Cyber Awareness Message sent out on 16 December identifying…
