Virginia Democratic Senator Mark Warner stated on Sunday that former President Donald Trump rightly described TikTok as a “enormous menace.”
After declaring ZTE and Huawei national-security risks, Trump ordered a review of the Chinese-owned app, which is controlled by the Chinese Community Party (CCP), in July 2020. Employees of TikTok’s parent business, ByteDance, are expected to attend regular meetings to study the party’s regulations, according to CNN in 2018.
“I believe Donald Trump was correct. I mean, TikTok is a huge threat. “It’s a concern on two levels,” Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told “Fox News Sunday” anchor Shannon Bream. “First, it’s a big collector of information, often of our children. They can even see right down to all your keystrokes. So, if you’re the parent of a child on TikTok, I’d be quite concerned because all of the data your child is entering and getting is being kept somewhere in Beijing.”
In addition to its data collection, Warner expressed alarm over the CCP-linked app.
“The second issue is that TikTok is a streaming network in a sense, and since TikTok and the Chinese communist party have to rely on the Communist Party at the end of the day, China law specifies that,” Warner explained. “If they wish to dial up the reality that we’re going to reduce information that criticizes Chinese authority while increasing stuff that kids may view saying, Taiwan is indeed part of China, it’s a distribution model that would dwarf RT, Sputnik, and some of the Russian propaganda platforms.”
Some experts referred to the American TikTok app as that of the “opium version” of the social networking site, pointing out that the Chinese version restricts the app’s content and the length of screen time a child below the age of 14 can spend on it.
