Ukraine considering following suit if US bans TikTok
Ukraine would consider banning TikTok if the U.S. does it first, lawmaker Yaroslav Yurchyshyn said in an interview with RBC-Ukraine released on April 1.
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill in March 2024 requiring Chinese TikTok's parent company ByteDance to sell its stakes in the company within six months or lose access to U.S. markets. The bill has yet to be passed in the Senate, and the app is still freely available in the U.S.
When asked if Ukraine would also ban TikTok, Yurchyshyn said that a decision by the U.S. could provide a basis for Ukraine to follow suit.
Yurchyshyn acknowledged that actually banning the app would be difficult and said that we "are still monitoring the process."
Lawmakers in the U.S. opposed to TikTok have often pointed to its Chinese connections, even though TikTok has said it would not approve of Chinese government requests to access the data of users in the U.S.
TikTok has also been widely used to spread disinformation, including about the war in Ukraine.
Bloomberg reported in February 2023 that TikTok had uncovered a massive network of pro-Russian disinformation spread on the app.
TikTok reportedly had more than 13 million users in Ukraine as of the beginning of 2023, the site Data Reportal wrote, citing data from ByteDance.
Alexander Query
