Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) praised former President Donald Trump on Sunday for recognizing the threat posed by TikTok, warning that parents should be “very concerned” about their children using the app.
Warner issued the warning during a Fox News Sunday appearance after being asked about the Beijing-owned social media giant, which has become a national security concern over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Trump ordered ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, to divest from the platform’s U.S. operations or see the app banned nationwide in mid-2020. The Biden administration is trying to reach a security agreement with ByteDance to avoid such a ban, but bipartisan fear has grown that TikTok cannot be truly separated from its country of origin.
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“Well, I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat,” Warner told host Shannon Bream. “It’s a threat on two levels.”
One problem, the Senate Intelligence chief warned, is that TikTok 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 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.”
Warner continued by questioning “the idea that we can somehow separate out TikTok from the fact that the actual engineers writing the code in Beijing.”
“The Justice Department is 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 second problem is that TikTok, in a sense, is a broadcasting network,” the Virginia Democrat then explained. “And TikTok, at the end of the day, has to be reliant on the Communist Party, the China law states that.”
The consequences of this, Warner said, could include Beijing censoring content critical of China while increasing “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.”
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Warner’s interview Sunday took place moments after an appearance from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) on the program, where he also discussed concerns about the Chinese social media company and its influence in the West. Cotton, who serves with Warner on the Intelligence Committee, was asked about his suggestion on Thursday that people who use TikTok delete the app from their phone and get a new phone if possible.
“There have been reports indicating that that data is accessible in mainland China. That TikTok, a Chinese company, is subject to communist China’s laws and that TikTok is one of the most massive surveillance programs ever, especially on America’s young people,” Cotton told Bream. “That it’s not just the contents you upload to TikTok but all the data on your phone and other apps, all your personal information, even facial imagery, even where your eyes are looking on your phone.”
