TikTok banned from devices managed by House as Biden signs Omnibus bill banning TikTok from federal devices

The U.S. House of Representatives has banned TikTok from all House-managed devices.

The House’s Chief Administrative Officer said that the app is considered “high risk due to a number of security issues,” and ordered all lawmakers and staff to delete the app from all devices managed by the House.

The move follows similar bans being passed across the nation. 19 states have instated some sort of restriction on the app over concerns that the Chinese government could use the app to track Americans and censor content.

TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, which is currently under investigation after employees reportedly accessed location data from several journalists in an attempt to try to track down their secret sources.

The $1.7 trillion 4,000-page Omnibus spending bill, passed last week, includes a provision which will ban TikTok on all federally managed devices. The bill has since been signed into law by President Biden.

“With the passage of the Omnibus that banned TikTok on executive branch devices, the CAO worked with the Committee on House Administration to implement a similar policy for the House,” a spokesperson for the Chief Administrative Officer told Reuters last week.