Sen. Warner: Trump Right About Threat from TikTok

enate Intelligence Chair Mark Warner (D-VA) told Fox News that former President Donald Trump “was right” in his warnings about social media platform TikTok.

“TikTok is a enormous threat,” Warner said. “It’s a threat on two levels.  One, it is a massive collector of information, oftentimes of our children. They can visualize even down to your keystrokes. So if you’re a parent and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”

“The second problem is that TikTok, in a sense, is a broadcasting network,” he said. “TikTok at the end of the day has to be reliant on the Communist Party. The China law states that. If they suddenly want to dial up the fact that we are going to decrease the content that criticizes Chinese leadership but increase the content that your kids may be seeing saying, ‘Hey, you know, Taiwan really is part of China,’ that is a distribution model that would make RT or Sputnik or some of the Russian propaganda models pale in comparison.”

In 2020, Trump issued executive orders aimed at TikTok and WeChat. The TikTok order cited the risk that China could track federal employees, conduct corporate espionage, censor politically sensitive content, and collect data to blackmail individuals. The order banned transactions with the social media platform, an effort that the Associated Press reported seemed aimed at blocking distribution of the apps in the U.S. With TikTok still available in the U.S., in 2021, President Joe Biden retracted the orders and ordered his administration to review and identify apps with “unacceptable risk” tied to foreign governments, CNBC reported. Negotiations are still ongoing over TikTok’s presence in the U.S.

In July this year, Warner and Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL) jointly called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to react to reports that individuals in China accessed U.S. user data, despite company officials’ claims that the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t have access to American user data. They also cited Chinese national security laws that allow the party to force access to data… (Excerpt from The Virginia Star)