Safety fears have put GAA off launching TikTok presence
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The GAA have no plans to develop an official presence on the social media platform TikTok.
Fears around user safety and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) have put the organisation off setting up profiles on the short video service, which is owned by Chinese internet company Bytedance and has approximately three million Irish users.
The GAA’s social media guidelines advises counties, clubs and other affiliations against using the app to promote Gaelic games. “The GAA does not have a presence on TikTok and, at this time, does not consider it to be an appropriate platform for GAA Units,” it reads. “The GAA’s concerns around TikTok are similar to those it has with Snapchat; around user safety and GDPR.”
Although an official GAA account exists, it has not published a video since January 2020. Some counties have also set up profiles but several of them appear to be dormant or used infrequently.
GAA digital content manager Niamh Boyle told the : “Counties tend to take their lead from us and mirror our channel usage. Additionally, we provide training and resources for certain channels but not all obviously. This remains under review but is resource dependent.”
The Ladies Gaelic Football Association (LGFA) and Camogie Association have official accounts on the platform, which currently have 14,200 and 4,661 followers respectively. In July, the LGFA’s championship sponsors Lidl ran a successful “Get Behind The Fight” campaign, which provided €50,000 worth of discounts at their stores for the best video clips posted on TikTok featuring action from the competitions.
Last year, Ireland’s national cyber security centre advised that TikTok not be installed or used on official public sector devices yet the company has an arm based in Dublin, which overlooks content moderation as well as data control in Europe and sales and marketing.
On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear TikTok’s plea against a proposed ban in the States where it has 150 million users. The case is to be heard next month after the Senate and House of Representatives earlier this year voted for the app to be prohibited within 12 months or sold because of its supposed Chinese government links.
Bytedance have regularly denied they share Tiktok user data with China. In February last year, US federal agencies were given 30 days to delete Tiktok from all government-issued mobile devices because of fears of data breaches.