In an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Democrat Senator Mark Warner of Virginia admitted that President Trump was right in his efforts to ban the popular video-sharing app TikTok. Warner stated that the Chinese-owned app poses a significant threat to security and privacy.
This is a rare instance of a Democrat senator acknowledging that Trump was right on a particular issue.
“I think Donald Trump was right. I mean, TikTok is an enormous threat,” he told host Shannon Bream. “So, if you’re a parent, and you’ve got a kid on TikTok, I would be very, very concerned. All of that data that your child is inputting and receiving is being stored somewhere in Beijing.”
What’s really amazing about this is that it’s not even the first time Senator Warner has publicly acknowledged that Trump was correct in his efforts to ban TikTok. In a previous interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Warner made similar remarks about the app’s threat to security and privacy.
“This is not something you would normally hear me say, but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” he said. “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.”
Virginia Democrat Sen. Mark Warner on TikTok: "I think Donald Trump was right. TikTok is an enormous threat." pic.twitter.com/8g2fRwxrF7
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) November 20, 2022
Warner’s comments come at a crucial time when Republican lawmakers and the FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr have called for a ban on TikTok due to concerns about how the app’s parent company, ByteDance, handles user data. FBI Director Christopher Wray has also discussed the threat posed by China and TikTok.
“China’s vast hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined,” he said recently during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing.
“They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations if they so chose or to control software on millions of devices, which gives the opportunity to potentially tactically compromised personal devices,” Wray said.