TikTok's European business should be "in European hands", following the example of the United States, Germany's Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said Tuesday.

ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, ceded control of the platform's U.S. operations to a majority American-owned joint venture, in response to a threatened ban in the United States.

"I am firmly convinced that Europe should follow the American example and that the company's ownership structure must be put up for discussion," Weimer told reporters before meeting his EU counterparts in Brussels.

"That means we should place TikTok's European business in European hands," he said.

"TikTok collects data on Europe's young people on an unimaginably large scale. This data flows to servers whose origin we do not know precisely," he added.

Weimer said Europe did not know what happened to the data, adding that "we are talking here about the most intimate data of Europe's youth".

Contacted by AFP, TikTok declined to comment.

TikTok has previously sought to allay EU concerns by storing European users' information in Europe, with limitations on who can access the data.

The EU executive did not support Weimer's comments.

Brussels did not look "at the colour of a company, at its ownership, at its country of origin. What we're looking at is compliance" with rules, European Commission spokesman Thomas Regnier told reporters in Brussels.

The platform is the subject of EU inquiries under the bloc's digital content rules.

The EU told TikTok in February that it needed to change its "addictive design" or risk heavy fines.

The platform is also under investigation in a separate probe opened in late 2024 on alleged foreign interference during the Romanian presidential elections.