While addressing the Senate floor, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) made his case for the ban of the social media giant, TikTok, which is owned by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
Many concerns have been raised regarding the ethical procedures of the company’s data collection of Americans, and whether those procedures have led to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) unsettling control of information on millions of U.S. citizens.
“For someone like me, who has argued for a national ban on a company like this, to take away something from over 100-and-something million Americans, many of whom I've heard from, many of whom I know personally, before we do something like that, I think people deserve an explanation as to why,” stated Sen. Rubio.
“Why is it that we would want to do that? I don't think the answer can just be, ‘Trust us, it's bad for America.’ I think they do deserve an answer, and I think they do deserve a clear argument as to why it's in our national interest to do this and why it's the only option we have.”
Rubio would go on in an attempt to debunk the notion that the CCP does not have any control of the app, pointing out the fact that the Chinese government said they would block a forced sale of the company.
“I read the other day that China says they're going to block any forced sale of TikTok. How could China block the forced sale of TikTok if they don't control TikTok? The reason they can block it is because, through these laws, they control the company that controls the algorithm that drives TikTok. [TikTok] is controlled by ByteDance. Under Chinese law, if the government of China tells ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, to use the algorithm a certain way, they have to do it.”
It doesn't matter if 100 percent of the shareholders of ByteDance are Americans. If they're located in China, and the Chinese government tells them, ‘We want you to use the algorithm and the data that you have access to in a certain way,’ they have no choice but to do it. That's not just true for ByteDance. That's true for every company in China,” said Sen. Rubio.
Representative Kat Cammack (R-FL) made headlines recently as well when discussing this very topic.
