Democratic Senator Admits ‘Donald Trump Was Right’ About TikTok: It’s an ‘Enormous Threat’
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) told Fox News Sunday anchor Shannon Bream that TikTok was an “enormous threat,” even going so far as to admit that former President Donald Trump was “right” about the risks posed by the Chinese-owned social medial platform.
Bream asked Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, what concerns he had about TikTok, and quoted his prior comments saying “as painful as it is for me to say, if Donald Trump was right and we could’ve taken action then, that’d have been a heckuva lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022.”
Trump was an outspoken critic of TikTok during his presidency, even openly pondering an attempt to ban the app altogether, due to the social media company’s parent company, ByteDance, ties to the Chinese communist government.
TikTok has had bipartisan critics. President Joe Biden also banned staffers on his 2020 presidential campaign from downloading the app, and in Oct. 2019, then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote a joint letter calling for it to be investigated.
“Did Washington simply not listen because they didn’t like the messenger then and what can we do now?” asked Bream.
“Well, I think Donald Trump was right,” Warner said. “I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat.”
Warner described TikTok as “a massive collector of information,” including from children using the app. “So if you’re a parent and you got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned,” he said. “All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
Warner expressed skepticism that was possible to separate the app from the engineers writing the code in China, and commented that another problem with TikTok was that it was a “broadcasting network, in a sense” controlled by the Chinese communist party, allowing them to diminish content that criticizes the Chinese government or promote content claiming Taiwan is part of China.
TikTok has the potential to be a “distribution model” that would make Russian propaganda networks like Sputnik or RT “pale in comparison,” Warner concluded.
Watch the video above, via Fox News.
