FCC commissioner Brendan Carr is calling for the popular Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok to be banned in the United States over privacy concerns. Even Democrats are voicing concerns over Tiktok, with Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) saying, “This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago.”
Carr, one of the two Republican commissioners on the five-person commission, said he believed the risk that Americans’ data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government was too great to ignore.
“I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” Carr told Axios in a recent interview.
“There simply 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 [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr said.
Carr’s comments come as TikTok negotiates with Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to determine whether it can be divested from ByteDance, the Chinese company that created it, and remain in the United States.
The Trump administration attempted to ban TikTok in the U.S. in 2020, and subsequently ordered ByteDance to divest the platform to a U.S. company.
As Axios points out, Democrats are also voicing concerns.
Via Axios:
“This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” Democratic Sen. Mark Warner said last week. “If your country uses Huawei, if your kids are on TikTok … the ability for China to have undue influence is a much greater challenge and a much more immediate threat than any kind of actual, armed conflict.”
As pressure mounts, the company insists it will be able to reassure U.S. government agencies that it is safe for Americans to use.
“We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the U.S. Government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns,” said a TikTok spokesperson.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.