Politics
Dem Senator Admits “Trump Was Right” on TikTok
Appearing for an interview on Fox News Channel’s”Fox News Sunday,” Democrat Senator Mark Warner of Virginia made an admission highly embarrassing to his party, which screeched and screamed about each and every Trump policy when Trump was in the White House.
And what was that admission? That “Trump was right” about TikTok, the Chinese app that’s highly addictive and a massive data siphon from America to Red China, giving theme both the ability to influence American youths and use data about America for war planning.
Speaking about the app and it posing a threat from a security and privacy standpoint, Senator Warner said, to “Fox News Sunday” host Shannon Bream:
“I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat. o, 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.”
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1594345235244457984
Senator Warner has made the admission before. He said something similar to The Sydney Morning Herald last month, saying:
“This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago. If your country uses Huawei, if your kids are on TikTok … the ability for China to have undue influence is a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray has also called out the threat posed by TikTok, saying:
“They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose or to control software on millions of devices, which gives the opportunity to potentially tactically compromised personal devices.”
Trump, during his presidency, tried to ban new downloads of TikTok but was stopped by legal challenges. Biden, after taking over, decided to cancel the executive order and let the Chinese app continue to siphon off American data without challenge. The BBC, reporting on that, said:
President Joe Biden has revoked an executive order from his predecessor Donald Trump banning Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat in the US.
[…]Mr Trump ordered the ban on new downloads of the viral video app TikTok, which is owned by Chinese firm Bytedance, in 2020.
He described it at the time as a threat to national security.
A proposal was produced that would have seen Oracle and Walmart owning a US entity of the service, and taking responsibility for handling TikTok’s US user data and content moderation.
But a series of legal challenges, and the fact Mr Trump was due to leave office shortly afterwards, meant neither the ban nor the involvement of the US companies ever came to fruition
The ACLU, at the time Biden revoked the order, cheered his decision to do so, saying:
“President Biden is right to revoke these Trump administration executive orders, which blatantly violated the First Amendment rights of TikTok and WeChat users in the United States.
“The Commerce Department’s review of these and other apps must not take us down the same misguided path, by serving as a smokescreen for future bans or other unlawful actions.“
Because, apparently, the First Amendment rights of Red Chinese intelligence ops are more important than the privacy and online security of Americans.
The app is facing a tough legal battle from CFIUS, however, as Vox reported, saying:
CFIUS is looking at ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical.ly, which it then combined with its own TikTok app to become what it is today. TikTok is reportedly trying to reach an agreement with CFIUS that would allow it to continue to operate in the US, but it hasn’t gotten there yet. CFIUS can and has blocked or unwound acquisitions before. It could do it again. So even though Trump is no longer in power, TikTok still faces the same threat of being kicked out of the United States or forced to be divested from its parent company.
