Banning TikTok adds to spreading of misinformation

Montreal-based doctor Mathieu Nadeau-Vallée joined TikTok during the pandemic to help counter medical misinformation and promote credible sources of information. He drew 87,000 followers, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers, and quickly became known as “le doc de TikTok.”

Nadeau-Vallée was an important source of authoritative information — until he and other doctors were ordered by hospitals to delete their personal TikTok accounts, citing orders to remove TikTok from government-issued devices.

In response, Nadeau-Vallée noted the fight to share accurate information is “a public health issue” and lamented that without doctors like him posting authoritative information, “it leaves the field open to misinformation.”

He’s correct. While misinformation is an issue across platforms — and something TikTok takes a multi-pronged approach to keep from spreading — content from creators like Nadeau-Vallée is one of the best defenses against online misinformation: countering it with authoritative information.

Coincidentally, authoritative information is exactly what’s missing from decisions to ban TikTok from government-issued devices and censor voices like Nadeau-Vallée.

Since announcing its ban on Feb. 27, the federal government has cited no specific risk, nor provided a justification for its policy. In fact, recently released documents revealed Public Safety Canada did not even conduct a security analysis of TikTok as part of the decision to ban TikTok on government devices.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s decision caused others to rashly follow suit: provincial and municipal governments made similar bans, parliamentarians were ordered to delete personal accounts, and some universities and hospitals instructed students and staff to delete the app from their personal devices.

TikTok has been singled out as a result of geopolitics, not evidence-based policy, so let’s be clear: TikTok complies with the laws where its services operate — in Canada that means federal and provincial privacy laws. We’ve never shared Canadian user data with the Chinese government, nor would we if asked to.

Singling out TikTok without applying the same scrutiny to other apps does nothing to protect Canadians. All apps that collect user data, such as Facebook, WeChat, or Candy Crush, should be assessed against objective criteria based on security, privacy, and business needs before being allowed on government devices.

The harms from these arbitrary and ill-advised policies are real. Rather than strengthening our civic and democratic resilience, these decisions — made citing nothing more than hypothetical fears — have the opposite effect. They undercut public discourse by shuttering channels that public institutions and authoritative voices were using to reach Canadians where they are.

Millions of Canadians can no longer engage with their elected leaders on TikTok. While the most high-profile accounts to disappear belonged to prominent politicians like NDP leader Jagmeet Singh and CPC leader, Pierre Poilievre, the greatest impact has been felt by those with a lower profile who leveraged TikTok to gain national and international reach, like Ontario Progressive Conservative MPP Goldie Ghamari.

Ghamari first drew followers on TikTok with behind-the-scenes videos of Queen’s Park before posting videos in 2022 about the treatment of women and girls in Iran. Her videos, some of which had millions of views, surfaced important information and had international reach; her following grew to over 250,000. She ran her account entirely on her personal device, but was forced to delete it when Ontario banned TikTok not just from government-issued devices, but from the private devices of MPPs too.

If Ottawa has specific questions about our platform, we’ve already committed to working constructively to address them. We’re well underway with similar commitments in the United States and European Union, where the protections we’re putting in place far exceed what any other platform has undertaken.

Every day, millions of Canadians come to TikTok to show their creativity, learn, and exchange ideas with a local, national and global community. As they do so, we work hard not just to meet their expectations for the security and privacy of their data, but to exceed them.