Whoever wins the Tory leadership on Monday will face a mountain of problems from day one. War, inflation, spiralling costs and a mutinous party: the in-tray will be veritably groaning. One issue that won’t perhaps be at the top of the list will be the future of the Prime Ministerial TikTok account: 10downingstreet. Officials have spent the past 11 months running the account, uploading videos of Boris goofing around to the page’s 292,000 followers.
His presumptive successor though takes a rather more dim view of TikTok, whose parent company ByteDance has been criticised for its ties to Beijing. During the course of one leadership debate, Liz Truss said with regards to TikTok that: ‘We absolutely should be cracking down on those types of companies’, suggesting she won’t be such a fan of viral clips about the Euros or rebutting Jeremy Clarkson. A series of Freedom of Information requests found that most government departments don’t use TikTok but that the Cabinet Office did use advertising on the platform to support the Covid-19 communications campaign. The Food Standard’s Agency is also running its #speakupforallergies ad campaign on the platform.
It shows the tension at the heart of Whitehall: do policymakers use one of the most popular apps among young people to communicate their message? Back in June Buzzfeed News reported that leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings detailed Chinese-based employees of the popular video sharing app repeatedly accessing US user data. The audio suggested that in some situations US employees could not access user data and instead relied on Chinese employees to do so, according to BuzzFeed. Such concerns prompted MPs to pressure parliamentary bosses to close their short-lived TikTok account.
Still, some in Westminster are certainly fans of the app. Mr S is aware of at least one cabinet minister whose offspring enjoys posting videos bemoaning their father’s colleagues…
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