The House Foreign Affairs Committee is reportedly planning to push through a new bill over the course of the coming weeks that will allow Old Uncle Joe the power to issue a wholesale ban on the use of China’s TikTok app within the United States.
The push from Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) comes directly in the wake of his telling Bloomberg News this past month regarding his concern with the app being that it “gives the Chinese government a back door into our phones.”
Former President Donald Trump attempted to put a block on the TikTok app from being used in the U.S. through a variety of measures that ultimately failed to make it through court and Biden soon quit the effort.
The push has since been renewed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to try and ban TikTok this past December and has recently outlined in media interviews the security concerns that the social media titan presents to the nation.
“We’re gonna go back to TikTok, people say, you know, ‘Why do we care about what some 16-year-olds are doing?’” expressed Rubio, who currently sits as the Ranking Member on the Senate Intelligence Committee. “I don’t think the threat is that some 16-year-old likes these cool videos that are on there, which I admit are- are attractive, obviously, because the artificial intelligence makes it so. It’s the massive amount of data that they’re collecting, not on one 16-year-old, not on a thousand 16 year-olds, but on millions and millions of Americans that give them commercial advantages, potentially the advantage of being able to shape American public opinion in a time of crisis, that- that just give them an extraordinary insights that allow them to steer the conversation in this country in any direction they want.”
Even Mark Warner (D-VA), the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, finally agreed about the heinous threat that TikTok poses to the U.S., stating that overall the company is “still responsible to the Communist Party.”
“138 million users in America use TikTok on a regular basis, average about 90 minutes a day,” stated Warner. “I’m sure your network would love to have 138 million Americans spending 90 minutes a day on your network. And I’m not saying that the TikTok or Communist Party is driving the- the videos you see. But the- the fact is, the algorithms that determine what you see on TikTok, is determined out of Beijing by China. And the proof is, if you look at what Chinese kids are seeing on their version of TikTok, which emphasizes science and engineering, versus what our kids and kids around the world are seeing, it is dramatically different.”
