The minister made the comment in a post he shared on the Iranian social media application Virasty.
“After months of dispute, the US government finally made its decision to ban or get the ownership of TikTok. In today’s world, data is of key and strategic importance to countries, even more than oil”, Zarepour said in his post.
He also said that even the countries that claim to advocate freedom of speech are serious when it comes to guarding their big data.
On March 14, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill that calls for TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance to divest from the company or be removed from US app stores.
The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate. But President Joe Biden has backed the bill and said that he would sign it into law if it passes Congress.
The US has claimed that TikTok could allow the Chinese government to access user data, posing a national security threat. The Chinese government has vehemently rejected that claim.
TikTok is used by 170 million people in the US, which represents nearly half of the country’s population.
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