Democrat Sen. Mark Warner admitted that President Trump was right about TikTok being an “enormous threat.”
Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, made the comments during an interview with Shannon Bream on Fox News Sunday.
“I think Donald Trump was right, I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat, it’s a threat on two levels,” Warner said.
“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,” Warner explained.
“All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing,” he added.
Warner further explained, “as painful as it is for me to say, if Donald Trump was right and we could’ve taken action then, that’d have been a heckuva lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022.”
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Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner on TikTok: "I think Donald Trump was right. TikTok is an enormous threat." pic.twitter.com/8g2fRwxrF7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 20, 2022
Summit News noted:
“The idea that we can somehow separate out TikTok from the fact the actual engineers writing the code in Beijing I think is a — The Justice Department’s trying to come up with a solution. I’m going to take a look at that solution, but they’ve got a huge mountain to climb,” the Senator further noted.
“The second problem is that TikTok in a sense is a broadcasting network.” Warner continued, adding “And if the Chinese Communist Party and TikTok at the end of the day has to be reliant on the Communist Party, the Chinese law states that.”
“If they suddenly want to dial up the fact that we’re 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,” he further stated.
Sen. Tom Cotton sent a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas earlier this month demanding information about foreign TikTok employees in the United States.
The Gateway Pundit reported:
Cotton cited security concerns that TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance pose to American citizens’ personal data.
He also requested details on TikTok’s use of H-1B guest workers who may have ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
“I write regarding TikTok and its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and their use of H-1B guest worker visas for employees who might have ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),” Sen. Cotton wrote.
The letter continued, “TikTok captures vast amounts of private information on users, including American citizens, and has long been suspected of providing the CCP with potential access to that information. This threatens the safety and security of American citizens, and also functions as an avenue for the Chinese government to track the locations of and develop blackmail on Federal employees and contractors.”
“In response to security and espionage concerns, TikTok claims that it stores ‘all TikTok US user data in the United States,’ and that its ‘data centers are located entirely outside of China,’” Sen. Cotton continued. “In a Senate hearing, TikTok’s vice president added that TikTok has a ‘US-based security team that handles access to user data.’ However, recent public reports indicate that sensitive data on American users of TikTok has been accessed from within China, that Beijing-based employees of ByteDance have targeted specific American users for surveillance, and that at least 300 TikTok and ByteDance employees are also current or former employees of Chinese state media.”
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