Germany’s culture minister urges Europe to follow the US by placing TikTok’s local business under European control over data concerns.
BRUSSELS: TikTok’s European business should be “in European hands”, following the example of the United States, Germany’s Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said Tuesday.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ceded control of the platform’s US operations to a majority American-owned joint venture, in response to a government threat to ban its US operations.
“I am firmly convinced that Europe should follow the American example and that the company’s ownership structure must be put up for discussion,” Weimar told reporters before meeting his EU counterparts in Brussels.
“That means we should place TikTok’s European business in European hands,” he said.
“TikTok collects data on Europe’s young people on an unimaginably large scale. This data flows to servers whose origin we do not know precisely,” he added.
Weimar said Europe did not know what happened to the data, adding that “we are talking here about the most intimate data of Europe’s youth”.
TikTok has sought to allay EU concerns about data by storing European users’ information in Europe, with limitations on who can access the data.
The platform is also the subject of EU inquiries under the bloc’s digital content rules.
The EU told TikTok in February that it needed to change its “addictive design” or risk heavy fines.
The platform is also under investigation in a separate probe opened in late 2024 on alleged foreign interference during the Romanian presidential elections.
