TikTok users posting videos of cats or dancing do not pose a security threat to the UK, a cabinet minister has said, as he defended the government’s decision not to ban the Chinese-owned video platform.
The government has allowed the app to continue running in Britain, as it stopped working in the US before a federal ban comes into force.
Britain’s approach to China threatens to be one of a number of sources of tension between Downing Street and the incoming Trump administration, with the UK looking for a rapprochement with Beijing while the US president-elect threatens further trade tariffs.
Jones told the BBC on Sunday: “We always keep all of these technology issues under consideration, whether it’s for national security or data privacy concerns – we have laws in place and processes to do that.
“We have no plan from the UK, so we won’t be following the same path that the Americans have followed, unless or until, at some point in the future there is a threat that we are concerned about in the British interest.”
He added: “There is a different approach on government devices [on which] we’ve not been allowed to use TikTok for many years. The last Conservative government took the same position because there’s sensitive information on those devices, but for consumers who want to post videos of their cats or dancing, that doesn’t seem like a national security threat to me.”
The government’s position contrasts with that taken in the US, where TikTok stopped working this weekend ahead of a law that would force its parent company, ByteDance, either to sell it to a non-Chinese owner or shut it down entirely. TikTok has said it cannot be sold to another company and so chose to remove the app from app stores over the weekend.
Trump has threatened to ramp up tariffs on China after taking office on Monday. His position on TikTok, however, has changed since he was last in office.
Trump proposed a TikTok ban in 2020 but has recently promised to work with the company to find a political solution to the standoff, having found a large audience on the platform during the 2024 election campaign.
He said on Saturday he would “most likely” grant the company a 90-day reprieve from the federal ban while he worked out what to do with it in the longer term.
