There are currently “no plans” for the UK to follow in America’s footsteps and ban TikTok, a cabinet minister said.
Darren Jones said cats and dancing videos do not “seem like a national security threat”, but suggested the position could change if an issue emerges which the government is “concerned about”.
The Chinese-opened app was “forced to go dark” in the US on Sunday after a Supreme Court ruling upheld a law that shut the platform down.
The ban was implemented over concerns about its links to Beijing, with the social media giant given a deadline of 19 January to be sold to an approved US buyer.
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Asked if the UK could follow suit, Mr Jones told the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg programme: “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 plans right now to ban TikTok 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.”
Darren Jones
Mr Jones, who is the chief secretary to the Treasury, pointed out that TikTok is not allowed on government phones “because there’s sensitive information on those devices”.
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What does US TikTok ban mean?
However he said for “consumers who want to post videos of their cats or dancing, that doesn’t seem like a national security threat to me”.
The Conservatives introduced the TikTok ban on UK government devices in 2023 after a review found there “could” be a risk to how data and information is used by the app.
Also speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, shadow foreign secretary Dame Priti Patel said she was “not considering” pushing for the UK to go further with a full ban on the app.
However she said that Labour ministers should be looking at what other countries were doing.
She said: “It’s too binary to say ‘should we just ban this in the UK?’, we have to look at the concerns that are reflected overseas, so here in America, learn some lessons and take some of those considerations into our own judgment before we come up with policy ideas.”
The US ban is the end result of legislation passed by President Joe Biden in April that called for TikTok parent ByteDance to sell the popular short-video app or see it shut in the US.
The company sought to have the move declared unconstitutional on free speech grounds but lost the last-ditch legal bid.
US president-elect Donald Trump has told NBC News he will “most likely” give TikTok 90 more days to work out a deal after he is sworn into office on Monday.