WASHINGTON Reuters -- Maryland Governor Larry Hogan has issued an emergency directive on Tuesday banning Chinese-owned short-video sharing app TikTok on state government devices and networks, the latest U.S. Republican to crack down on TikTok.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem signed an executive order banning state employees and contractors from installing or using TikTok on state-owned devices. South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster on Monday asked a state agency to ban TikTok from state government phones and computers.
Hogan said that the ban covers a number of Chinese and Russian-influenced products and platforms because they present an unacceptable level of cybersecurity risk to the state. The Maryland executive branch agencies must remove products from state networks and prevent access.
TikTok said that the concerns that led to state bans were fueled by misinformation.
The company said on Tuesday that the many state agencies, offices, and universities that have been using TikTok to build communities and connect with constituents will no longer have access to our platform.
Hogan's directive applies to Huawei Technologies, ZTE Corp, Tencent Holdings' WeChat, QQ and QQ Wallet, Alibaba products and Russia's Kaspersky Lab.
Brendan Carr, a Republican member of the Federal Communications Commission, said Hogan's action would protect Maryland from the threats posed by malign foreign actors. Last month, FBI Director Chris Wray said that TikTok's U.S. operations raised national security concerns, flagging the risk that the Chinese government could use the video-sharing app to influence users or control their devices.
It's possible that Beijing could use the popular app, owned by ByteDance, to control software on millions of devices, giving it the chance to technically compromise those devices, Wray added.
In 2020, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States CFIUS ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok because of the fears that U.S. user data could be passed on to Beijing, a committee that examines foreign acquisitions of U.S. assets for potential national security risks.
CFIUS and TikTok have tried to reach a national security agreement for months to protect the data of TikTok's more than 100 million US users, but sources said it appears unlikely a deal will be reached before January.
TikTok executive Vanessa Pappas told lawmakers in September that TikTok was making progress toward a final agreement with the U.S. government.
In 2020, President Donald Trump tried to block new U.S. users from downloading WeChat and TikTok, which would have effectively blocked the apps' use in the United States, but lost a series of court battles.
In June 2021, President Joe Biden withdrew Trump's executive orders that he wanted to ban the downloads and directed the Commerce Department to conduct a review of security concerns posed by the apps.