A.G. Gancarski
With the House overwhelmingly voting for a measure requiring ByteDance to sell control of TikTok in order for the app to operate in America, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio is hoping that the Senate will follow the lower chamber’s lead.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act cracks down on “distributing, maintaining, or providing internet hosting services for a foreign adversary controlled application,” as exemplified by ByteDance’s control over TikTok.
Rubio has been a leading voice warning about security issues with the Chinese-owned social media app.
“We are united in our concern about the national security threat posed by TikTok — a platform with enormous power to influence and divide Americans whose parent company ByteDance remains legally required to do the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party,” said Rubio in a joint statement with Sen. Mark Warner.
“We were encouraged by today’s strong bipartisan vote in the House of Representatives, and look forward to working together to get this bill passed through the Senate and signed into law.”
Warner, the Virginia Democrat who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has worked with Vice Chairman Rubio in calling attention to security issues posed by the TikTok app domestically for years.
Rubio has warned that the Chinese-controlled social media channel has worked against American interests with propaganda tailored to shape domestic policy debates and to poison young people against the historical consensus.
In an October interview with Sean Hannity, Rubio contended that TikTok was to blame for the “pro-Hamas” position taken by young people on college campuses and beyond in the wake of terror attacks on Israel and the country’s subsequent retaliation.
The Senator’s concern about TikTok, of course, precedes the current phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. During his 2022 campaign for re-election, Rubio ripped Democrat Val Demings for “dancing” and deciding to “campaign on China-linked TikTok.”
He also pushed the Federal Trade Commission to formally investigate the social media company and its parent company, ByteDance. The Senator argued that TikTok engineers and executives in the People’s Republic of China repeatedly access U.S. users’ private data.
In 2021, Rubio urged President Joe Biden to block TikTok completely in light of the Chinese government taking an ownership stake in the company, an “extension of the party-state.”
Even before Biden was President, Rubio anticipated TikTok being used as a weapon of mass deception in the way he notes now. He and other Republican Senators wrote Donald Trump administration officials with grave concerns that “the Chinese Communist Party could use its control over TikTok to distort or manipulate conversations to sow discord among Americans and to achieve its preferred political outcomes.”
3 comments
MH/Duuuval
March 13, 2024 at 9:09 pm
It’s a given that companies doing. business in the PRC — attracted by the potential market size and profits — will have all their proprietary information plundered by the CCP.
If US citizens know this and don’t care if the CCP has their info, then why should they be barred from access to TiK Tok?
Hung Wiil
March 14, 2024 at 5:57 pm
Sen Rubio is disappointing me, again. He just never was philosophically conservative. Too much party time in his youth, and his academics suffered. He had fun, but now we are faced with more bad policy decisions. If Chinese Tik Tok is so toxic to national security, then why did Biden set up an account on February 12, 2024? This is big government at its worst, trying to control the flow of information. Yes, Tik Tok and social media are stupid, and the consumers are idiots. But that does not justify this exercise of power. STOP.
MH/Duuuval
March 14, 2024 at 8:04 pm
Wait a minute — now you want to proffer Biden as some sort of savant of the internet?
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