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On Dec. 20, State Representative Daryl Deshotel announced he is pre-filing legislation for the upcoming 2023 legislative session to ban the app TikTok from all devices owned or leased by the State of Louisiana.

“TikTok is a Chinese company with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The last thing we need to do is give them access to the data on our state devices,” Deshotel said. “This is common sense. We have no way of knowing what information is being shared or how TikTok is being used by the Chinese government to gather information on United States government officials.”

 In 2020, United States Department of Justice lawyers filed a court brief stating ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming has made public statements showing he is “committed to promoting” the agenda of the Chinese Communist Party. TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China.

Legislation has been filed by Congress to ban the app on federal government devices, and several states are already in the process of doing the same.

“We’ve seen first-hand that foreign agents will go to any length necessary to gather important intelligence on the United States using social media applications and sophisticated data collection,” Deshotel said. “TikTok is a clear-and-present danger to our national security and election integrity. It should be banned from government devices immediately.”