RESIST THE MAINSTREAM - Tony Gray - DEC 11, 2022
President Joe Biden, in June 2021, revoked a Donald Trump executive order that banned ByteDance, owner of TikTok, in the U.S.
“The United States must take aggressive action against the owners of TikTok to protect our national security,” former President Donald Trump declared in his executive order. The 45th president noted the U.S. military previously banned TikTok from official phones and India had banned TikTok already.
A number of governors have taken action lately to guard against perceived cybersecurity threats posed by the Chinese-owned video sharing platform.
According to a Washington Examiner report, Govs. Greg Abbott (R-TX), Larry Hogan (R-MD), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Henry McMaster (R-SC), Pete Ricketts (R-NE) and Kevin Stitt (R-OK) have signed orders banning TikTok from state electronic devices.
It’s not just Republicans who consider TikTok a potential security vulnerability that needs to be excised.
“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 heck of a lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) said, according to a Vox report. “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.”
Warner, the Democratic chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee shares his worry with Republican vice chair Marco Rubio. Sen. Rubio (R-FL) has warned about dangers posed by TikTok as early as 2019. Rubio informed Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin in a letter that he was concerned China used apps like TikTok to further foreign policy.
“The Chinese government’s nefarious efforts to censor information inside free societies around the world cannot be accepted and pose serious long-term challenges to the U.S. and our allies,” Rubio informed then-Secretary Mnuchin.
His concerns were expressed before many IT security concerns were raised about data harvesting conducted by the app, which allegedly forwards user data to China.
“The Chinese government has long engaged in systematic, covert efforts to access sensitive data from U.S. governments, companies, and individuals,” Nebraska’s Gov. Pete Ricketts said in the Summer of 2020.
“As an app owned by a company based in China,” Ricketts continued, “TikTok is legally obligated to provide data from its users to the country’s communist regime upon request. To maintain the security of data owned by the State of Nebraska, and to safeguard against the intrusive cyber activities of China’s communist government, we’ve made the decision to ban TikTok on State devices.”