Norway’s justice minister apologized on Wednesday for failing to admit, when asked in Parliament, that she had installed and used TikTok on her government-provided phone.
The popular video-sharing app is Chinese-owned, raising fears in the West that Beijing could use it to harvest user data or push pro-China narratives or misinformation.
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Justice Minister Emilie Enger Mehl, 29, told lawmakers on Wednesday that she had installed TikTok on her government phone for about a month last fall and has since removed it. Questioned by opposition lawmakers in the past, she dodged the issue citing “security reasons.”
The Norwegian Minister of Justice has publicly apologized for installing and using TikTok on her state device.
“I could have been open about this earlier,” Enger Mehl said on Wednesday. “I’m sorry that the matter played out that way… I see in hindsight that he should have been open about the fact that he had TikTok on a (government) phone before.”
The matter arose in September, when Norway’s Dagbladet newspaper reported that Enger Mehl’s TikTok posts included photos and videos of his official duties. That raised concerns that confidential information and government activity may have found its way to Chinese authorities.
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In a television interview on February 1, Enger Mehl admitted to installing TikTok on his government phone, three months after he was first asked about it. He claimed that he had consulted with his ministry prior to the installation.
Erna Solberg, a former prime minister now in opposition, said it was “stupid that a justice minister, responsible for security laws, has installed TikTok on her work phone.” During his eight-year tenure, Solberg advised government officials not to use TikTok on work phones.
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TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that moved its headquarters to Singapore in 2020. Several US states have moved to ban the video-sharing app on state-issued devices for government workers.
