Sen. Tom Cotton commended President Trump’s actions against Chinese-owned app TikTok, claiming it’s a major threat to national security.
“TikTok is like a Trojan horse on American cellphones,” Cotton said Sunday on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.
The Arkansas Republican added that he believes the video-sharing app is taking advantage of user data in phones, including contact lists, emails, texts, and browser history.
“That all goes back to servers in China, where it can be accessed by the Chinese Communist Party for decades to come,” he said.
Last week, President Trump signed an executive order prohibiting any U.S. citizens or company from conducting business with TikTok starting in 45 days. The ban applies to TikTok’s parent company ByteDance and its subsidiaries, which puts pressure on Microsoft to address the country’s national security concerns in its efforts to buy the app’s U.S. operations.
Cotton said if the app is going to operate in the United States, it has to do so under a U.S. parent company and be wholly owned and operated within U.S. borders.
“There can be no lingering ties to China, and I think we have to be reasonably skeptical about any American companies to do that,” he said. “They have to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the U.S. government that they can sever all those ties. Otherwise, these software companies will have to be banned in America for the safety and the privacy of Americans, especially our kids.”
TikTok, popular among a younger demographic, may pose threats to people who have used the app for years and are now entering sensitive careers, Cotton added.
“Young Americans who were using it are now in their early 20s,” he said. “Some of those are in sensitive positions in our military or in the federal government or industry or national laboratories on working on cutting-edge projects.”
