It is reasonable to ban all social media of any kind of on an employee phone in my opinion.

The government deciding that you can use set of social media apps but not another one is not as reasonable.

(Somewhat depending on what classifies as social media, where I would put "hooking up sites" in a different category)

It is not unreasonable for governments to require all apps be published by US companies

So I shouldn't be able to install an Australian banking app on my US phone?

If by "US phone", you mean "work phone issued by the US government", then that's right, you shouldn't.

It's not unreasonable for the US federal government to ban employees of the US federal government from using Australian banking apps on work devices issued by the US federal government.

It is a separate conversation if any of those variables change.

If you’re a government employee, installing an app for a foreign bank account on your work phone may be the least of your roadblocks in that regard. Foreign financial influence is a serious concern.

What counts as a US company? TikTok Inc is based out of California.

The beneficial owners are the CCP, via Bytedance.

Go interview there. At a high enough level everyone you interview with is in mainland China.

They are a Californian company only in name. The guys running the company are in China. They don’t even do a good job hiding it.

Then US should make it a law that companies must be owned by americans (other countries have this kind of law) otherwise it's just racism and you would'n't mind if the company was ran by Swedish people

Trying to make this about race is lame. A weak straw man.

(Reasonable and educated) People in the US don’t care about the race of TikTok upper management, they care about the influence of a hostile government that is openly waging a fourth-generation war with the US. Sweden for example is not.

TikTok posing as an independent California company when we all know that is not the case is not helping them.

Reasonable and educated people in the US should be more critical of their own government which wages wars all around the world. China isn't a saint either but let's be real.

This seems like a non sequitur, although I do agree that more people should be more critical or at least cautious to support actions by the US abroad. The parent comment didn’t compare the US and China (foreign policy or otherwise). For instance, there was no discussion of any US big tech involvement in China.

They did, however, compare Sweden and China, both with respect to the US.

This seems like a somewhat bad faith response given that the parent comment described the people as “in (mainland) China,” not “Chinese” or something else that could denote race/ethnicity along with nationality.

It seems like it'd be easy enough to add enough layers to convince a court that it's a US company, doesn't it?

Does not sound legal nor within the Constitution/free speech. Hope we don’t go down a road like this.

This does not go against free speech if there’s government data on your device.

That's not how free speech is defined or works, legally.

Government institutions get to decide what goes on government devices.

Ah didn’t read past the headline. Was assuming this was personal devices.

The headline seems to describe the rest of the story. A bill was introduced to ban TikTok nationwide, and according to the article there is "increasing pressure" on the executive branch to introduce a nationwide ban.

> Is it just me, or does this sound completely reasonable and not at all newsworthy?

It's not even you. You seem to find it notable that government employees were allowed to install social media apps at all, so you must find it baffling that they banned TikTok and didn't ban the others.

well, most government have a social media presence. it seems easier to reach people that way. why wouldn't they allow these apps on employees devices, or at least some employees?

> Why were government employees, with government-owned devices, allowed to install any third party apps (much less social media apps) to begin with?

Communicating with the public can be part of their job. In some cases they write and send tweets themselves. In other cases they might have a whole team handling their social media.

In 99% of cases they should be fired. Sure, if they are an ambassador or US congressman, they are expected to be public figures. If they are influential and expected to influence and have a high up role, then maybe they should have some ability to influence given that they are influencing their department.

The idea that somebody working for the government that has an opinion should naturally be given any kind of voice whatsoever is ridiculous. If it's not part of their job they need to be fired immediately.

Social media communication by the government is hugely advantageous for the public.

From youtube streams of meetings to twitter and facebook posts of government news (ex. weather/disaster alerts, public health issues, traffic accidents, voting date reminders) to vimeo uploads of police body camera footage.

The amount of easy transparency and important information delivered directly to citizens in a way they can choose to engage with is a big step in the right direction.

Before you basically had some traditional media (ex. radio/newspaper/nightly news) or you were required to have the free time to attend government functions yourself.

You might say "Then why not use official websites?" but there are many thousands of government websites for each agency/department/committee/public figure and while they have very useful information they are not good at what social media does.

Right now there is a thing (hashtag?) called BookTok on TikTok, where teens share recommendations for books. Its apparently big enough that librarians notice that there is a run on these books when they break.

Given that, unless TikTok is banned in general it would be a very hard case to make that a librarian shouldn't be using BookTok, when it measurably gets teens to read.

Sure you could make arguments against social media in general, and national security issues with TikTok specifically, but that is not the job of a librarian.

If you work in a library and find out one of your direct reports have installed Instagram on her government phone and is sharing stories about book recommendations or better ways to you use the library, and it is having an effect, then you are a bad boss if you do not support her.

Our state (KY) has not passed a ban yet, but there are 2 bills to do so and I expect them to be passed next week when the legislature resumes. The state IT dept is already blocking TikTok's website.

The way the bills are worded, the network ban will also include public libraries, schools and universities from being allowed to access the website.

0 - Senate Bill 20. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/sb20.html

1 - House Bill 124. https://apps.legislature.ky.gov/record/23rs/hb124.html