Politico’s Reportedly Trump-Friendly New Owner Wants to Outlaw Chinese-Owned TikTok: ‘A Tool of Espionage’

ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images

Mathias Döpfner, whose German media conglomerate owns Politico and other major media outlets, said he would to see the popular video sharing app TikTok banned.

The CEO of Axel Springer called the platform a Chinese “tool for espionage” that people in democracies willfully download.

The Wrap reported:

“TikTok should be banned in every democracy,” the CEO of Axel Springer – which owns Politico, Morning Brew and Business Insider – said at Vox Media’s Code Conference in Los Angeles, calling Western governments who allow the app “naive and dangerous.”

“TikTok should be banned in every country,” he repeated, in his Q and A with journalist Kara Swisher and professor Scott Galloway. “We have at the moment a naïveté with dealing with China…. We hand over personal data to the Chinese government.” He added: “It is of course a tool of espionage.”

TikTok has more than one billion users worldwide.

Döpfner made headlines this week after it was revealed he had written he hoped to see former President Donald Trump elected to a second term in 2020.

Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post wrote a profile on the media magnate Tuesday in which she shared an email he sent prior to the 2020 election.

“Do we all want to get together for an hour in the morning on November 3 and pray that Donald Trump will again become President of the United States of America?” Döpfner wrote in an email to his business partners.

He initially denied to Ellison he authored the email, but surrendered, “That is me… That could be.”

Ellison reported Döpfner also said Trump was right on critical issues, and stated, “No American administration in the last 50 years has done more.”

He said he was never a supporter of Trump and also called himself a “non-Jewish Zionist” with “small-L liberal” tendencies.

Axel Springer purchased Politico for $1 billion last year.