Croatia’s president pushed back on a suggestion by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the EU could ban TikTok, saying Wednesday that member countries should be able to decide for themselves whether they want to restrict use of the app.
“TikTok means nothing to me, but it means freedom for my children to use it if they want,” President Zoran Milanović said, according to Index.hr.
“Why would we ban it in Croatia, Hungary or Poland if we don’t want to?” he added. “I don’t know, maybe we will, maybe we won’t, but where are we asked?”
His comments were in response to von der Leyen’s remarks during a debate in Maastricht this week, co-hosted by POLITICO, that a bloc-wide ban of the China-linked app was “not excluded.”
“We know exactly the danger of TikTok,” von der Leyen said after the debate moderator referred to the situation in the U.S., where the social media platform faces a national ban unless it is sold by its owner, ByteDance.
She added that the European Commission was “the very first institution worldwide to ban TikTok on our corporate phones.”
Milanović is known for his controversial comments critical of the EU and NATO, and was banned from running for prime minister in Croatia’s recent election by the country’s top court due to already being the president.
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