Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner on Sunday admitted that former President Donald Trump was right about TikTok posing a threat to the country’s security.
Speaking on “Fox News Sunday,” Warner warned that parents should be “very concerned” about their children using the app.
“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,” he told host Shannon Beam.
Trump previously 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 following security concerns about the Chinese social media company and its influence in the West.
“Well, I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat,” Warner admitted. “It’s a threat on two levels.”
Warner went on to question “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 Virginia Democrat then explained. “The second problem is that TikTok, in a sense, is a broadcasting network … And TikTok, at the end of the day, has to be reliant on the Communist Party, the China law states that.”
This comes as TikTok faces scrutiny after it was reported that the company refuses to cut off the transfer of American information to China. Warner is one of the few politicians to call for a crackdown on the app, along with FBI Director Christopher Wray, who warned that it contributes to China’s status as the No. 1 thief of U.S. data in the world.
“China’s vast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined,” Wray told lawmakers last week. “[Dangers] 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 compromise personal devices.”
A leaked audio recording in June revealed that Chinese employees of ByteDance have repeatedly accessed non-public data about U.S. TikTok users. When asked about the issue, TikTok’s Chief Operating Officer, Vanessa Pappas, declined to comment, instead saying that the company vows to “satisfy all national security concerns.”
