Marco Rubio Introduces Legislation To Ban TikTok In The United States
You know things are getting weird when you agree with something Marco Rubio is doing. The otherwise useless U.S. Senator from Florida has introduced legislation to ban Chinese spying software “TikTok,” which has been collecting data and monitoring tens of millions of Americans for the last few years. Via NextGov:
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-FL., on Tuesday introduced bipartisan legislation that would ban the popular app TikTok from operating within the United States over national security concerns.
Rubio’s bill—the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party, or ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act—already has bipartisan support in the House, with Reps. Mike Gallagher, R-Wis., and Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., authoring companion legislation.
“The federal government has yet to take a single meaningful action to protect American users from the threat of TikTok,” Rubio said in a statement. “This isn’t about creative videos—this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day. We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.”
TikTok is owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance. Numerous federal officials, including FBI Director Chris Wray, have testified that the Chinese Communist Party has authority over all Chinese companies, which “allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations.”
[NextGov]
More at the link on the evils of TikTok.
It’s not clear how a ban would actually be implemented (there are hundreds of Americans employed by TikTok here in the United States), but one less social media app that’s turning humans into zombies and destroying civilization is always a good thing. Assuming Elon Musk continues to run Twitter into the ground, that site should be dead by the end of 2023, hopefully.
