The National Security Council (NSC) has created a special task group to study the possible banning of the use of Tiktok among government security personnel.

"National Security Adviser Eduardo Ano has already created a special task group to study this matter and we have included there the National Intelligence Coordinating Agency the NICA, the armed forces and also the Department of Information and Communication Technology," NSC Assistant Director General and National Task Force - West Philippine Sea spokesman Jonathan Malaya said in a television interview on Wednesday.

"We will meet very soon. The purpose of course is to make a thorough study on the proposal to ban tiktok among security personnel of the government," he added.

Malaya explained that "the reason for this proposal is two fold, number one is the threat of data collection or cyber espionage among other security personnel and number two is the possible use of Tiktok as a social influence tool."

"You know through algorithms you can affect civic discourse so it is on that basis that we are making the study and we hope we finish soon so that we can make the proper recommendation to NSA (Security Adviser) Ano," he said.

The use of Tiktok for government employees in other countries, including the United States, Canada and India, were banned as it is allegedly being used for espionage.

"We know for a fact that in the United States Tiktok was caught spying on a journalist, a forbes journalist, and Tiktok accepted that they are spying and they fired the individual who did it, so based on the version of events coming from Tiktok it was an individual who did that, it was not the organization but just the same you know it happened and it can happen," said Malaya. Robina Asido/DMS