In a Wednesday interview on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) sounded off on the sale of popular Chinese video app TikTok after President Donald Trump has floated the idea of banning it.
Hawley said he still has a lot of questions about TikTok and its parent company ByteDance’s access to user data. He added that unless the United States can guarantee “total separation” from China and TikTok during a potential purchase, the app “ought to be banned.”
“It’s not so clear to me that this is a good deal for the United States of America. I mean, Microsoft buying TikTok, I don’t know what that means exactly,” Hawley stated. “Does that mean that Microsoft is going to make sure that there is absolutely no Chinese involvement from the Chinese parent company ByteDance in this Microsoft deal? I mean, are they going to rebuild TikTok, are they going to have total control? I’m not clear on any of that. It looks to me like Microsoft is only getting a portion of the company and that the Chinese parent company’s going to continue to maintain some sort of access, maybe share the platform, share the data. None of that’s acceptable, and we’ve got to protect Americans here and Americans’ data security.”
“I think that unless … we can make absolutely sure that there is total separation between China and TikTok, then yeah, it ought to be banned. I mean, unless we can absolutely see a guarantee that China is not getting some backdoor to TikTok, they’re not running it on the sly, then I think that yeah, it ought to be banned,” he concluded.
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