MADISON, Wis. — Gov. Tony Evers plans to issue an executive order in the near future to ban the popular social media platform TikTok from all state devices, a spokesperson confirmed Friday.
According to Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson with the governor’s office, the ban is likely to come next week. Further details on the order itself were not immediately available.
Evers’ decision to ban the app comes after a recent and renewed push from several lawmakers at the state and federal levels — including Republican members of Wisconsin’s congressional delegation — who’ve expressed concerns about the platform’s potential to allow the Chinese government to collect Americans’ data from the app, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance.
Last month, Evers said his administration had no plans at the time to ban the app from state devices, saying only about 12 state phones had the app downloaded.
RELATED: U.S. Representative from Wisconsin proposes federal TikTok ban
In mid-December 2022, U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-De Pere, alongside two other federal lawmakers, introduced a federal ban on the app citing privacy concerns as a major reason. In a statement released alongside the legislation, Gallagher described the app as “digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news.”
On Friday, Gallagher called the social media app a “CCP trojan horse” and said he’s glad Evers “finally made the decision to ban TikTok on state devices.”
While efforts to totally ban the app from the U.S. have been unsuccessful thus far, the recently signed federal spending bill included a ban of the app from all federal government-issued devices. Governors from several states nationwide have also ordered state employees to not use TikTok on government devices.
The platform rose to new levels of popularity amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic as more and more people flocked to the app in their newly-found downtime.
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