Days after the UK Government enacted a ban of TikTok on Government devices, the short-form video company is facing further scrutiny.
On Sunday, the BBC circulated a memo urging staff to delete the TikTok app from any company devices, unless an employee needed to access it for business reasons.
Reported guidance in the memo explained the decision as “based on concerns raised by government authorities worldwide regarding data privacy and security.”
In doing so, the BBC becomes the first major UK news organisation to ask its employees to delete the app. The Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) instituted a similar policy earlier this month.
The move comes just days after it was reported the US Department of Justice is investigating TikTok parent company Bytedance over potential surveillance of US citizens, including a number of journalists who cover the tech industry. The Biden administration this month asked Bytedance to divest its Chinese ownership or else face a nationwide ban.
TikTok has stated repeatedly that its collection of user data is secure, and that no Chinese official has or is able to access personal information of users.
Since launching five years ago, the app has quickly grown in popularity among young users, who turn to it for bursts of entertaining videos and, increasingly, important information about current events and even healthcare. Teens have been so attracted to TikTok that the company has recently taken steps to address concerns over mental health and app addiction by limiting young peoples’ usage of the app to an hour per day by default.
Due to its popularity among audiences that are often hard to reach through more traditional media channels, TikTok has become an important part of many media plans. TikTok has reportedly tried to allay potential worries of advertisers over the various bans, and despite anxieties the Government and BBC bans could generate for brands and creators, no advertisers have appeared to publicly raise any concerns.
Nor privately, either, it seems. “No advertisers have raised it as a concern,” one media agency boss told The Media Leader. “We’ll be asking TikTok questions but it hasn’t raised an industry wide crisis like the YouTube brand safety scandal seven years ago.”
A forecast from WARC earlier this month expects adspend to only continue increasing on the platform, with two-year ad revenue growth expected to increase by 53% to £15.2bn.
