President Trump banned Tik Tok by executive order August of 2020. Federal courts later halted it then President Biden revoked it. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wanted regulators to ban the app in the US. FBI Director Christopher Wray said Tik Tok is among the ways China steals data worldwide. Attempts to separate the US-based branch in China would be worthless. Democrats didn’t like the messenger.
Trump was right
Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner had to admit to it. Necessary action was taken earlier but Democrats undid it.
Warner repeated his earlier comments, adding “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.” Bream put it in black and white that Democrats didn’t like that Trump was right.
Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner on TikTok: "I think Donald Trump was right. TikTok is an enormous threat." pic.twitter.com/8g2fRwxrF7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 20, 2022
Trump knew what was going on
Bream wondered, “Did Washington simply not listen because they didn’t like the messenger then and what can we do now?” Warner said Tik Tok collected massive amounts of information.
“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 that Tik Tok has the potential to be a huge “distribution model” that would make Russian propaganda networks look like nothing in comparison.
Trump did what had to be done
It had to hurt New York Democrat Chuck Schumer to admit that Trump was right. In 2020 Schumer said,
“I have been very opposed to TikTok, I was one of the first to expose the Chinese links. And I have urged that TikTok be closed down in America. There’s a new proposal, Mnuchin and Meadows brought it up yesterday, to have Microsoft take it over. There are some questions that have to be answered. How will the data be stored and secured? Do the Chinese — will still the Chinese have links into TikTok? So before I would be for such a merger, I’d have to get some answers to these questions.”
Wray recently said,
“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. [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 compromised personal devices.”
Wray also told Axios back then that, “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban. There isn’t a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the CCP.”
