The Cabinet recently called on government officials to stop using TikTok on a work phone because of its parent company in China, because that country has an ‘offensive cyber program against the Netherlands’, Foreign Minister Alexandra van Hoevelin reports (Digital Affairs). Ultimately, you want civil servants not to have any orders from countries like China, but also from Iran and Russia. They indicated earlier this year that the four coalition parties VVD, D66, CDA and ChristenUnie supported the ban.

The application, which is especially popular among young people due to short films, was recently discussed in the US Congress. There, the company’s top man in the US is being questioned about the intentions and modus operandi. There are concerns in many countries that the Chinese government could access user data. The company vehemently denies that this happened.

D66 MP Hind Decker Abdulaziz recently called on her fellow parliamentarians to keep TikTok off their work phones. She finds it “incomprehensible” that parliamentarians are still allowed to use TikTok on their phones, “because senators and representatives also deal with sensitive government information.”

A spokesperson for D66 reports that he has never been on TikTok.