Trudeau stays quiet on future of TikTok in U.S. as party uses app

— Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has refused to comment on the future of TikTok in the United States, at a time when his own party is leaning on the app and its influencers to deliver the Liberals’ political message to Canadians.

The U.S. Senate passed a bill on Tuesday that would force TikTok’s parent company, Beijingbased ByteDance, to sell its share of the social-media app within a year or face a ban in the platform’s largest market.

The proposed ban was slipped into a $95-billion US aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and was signed into law on Wednesday by U.S. President Joe Biden. TikTok has since promised to challenge the “unconstitutional law” in court.

Trudeau said he would not comment on what other governments are doing, but that his own will continue to look out for Canadians’ security.

“We know that the security, the privacy and the data protection of Canadians needs to be a first priority for us,” Trudeau said on Wednesday.

“We’ve already taken significant measures on that and we will continue to do that. But we will act in ways that are right for Canadians.”

The federal Liberals ordered a national security review of TikTok last September, and the app is banned on federal government devices.

However, it is still used by the federal Liberal and New Democratic parties, which rely on it to reach young Canadians who increasingly flock to the app to discover news, information and popular culture.

Over the past year, the federal government has invited influencers who have a following on TikTok to events and private briefings, including for housing announcements and the recent federal budget.

“Canadians are consuming digital content more and more. As the media landscape grows, so does our approach to how we communicate,” Mohammad Hussain, a spokesman for Trudeau, said last week.

TikTok is the fasting-growing social-media app in Canada, a report last year from Toronto Metropolitan University shows, but it is also considered the least trusted.

For years, Western governments have expressed concerns that the popular platform could put sensitive data in the hands of China’s government or be used as a misinformation tool.Chinese law says the government in Beijing can order companies to help it gather intelligence.

A 2022 intelligence brief by Canada’s Privy Council Office shows TikTok is the first Chinese-owned app that to reach over a billion users beyond China, “creating a globally embedded and ubiquitous collection and influence platform for Beijing to exploit.”