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President Trump reminded the nation on Thursday that three years ago, he led the charge on sounding the alarm on the dangers of the Chinese-influenced viral app, TikTok.
“Has anybody noticed that everyone wants to go after and destroy TikTok due to China influence and national security?” he commented in a video posted to Truth Social. “When I wanted to disable TikTok three years ago, I was met with opposition from RINOs, Democrats and everyone else. They actually went to court in an effort to stop me. Now they realize I was right, and changed their tune.”
This week, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress and attempted to paint a picture of the app that did not pose a security and privacy risk to U.S. citizens, per CBS. The main concern, of course, has been that TikTok may be sharing sensitive data from the app with the Chinese Communist Party.
Astonishingly, Chew confirmed to Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., that ByteDance, the Chinese parent company to TikTok, has access to American users’ data.
In 2020, Trump signed an executive order to target the threat posed by TikTok downloads in the U.S. “This mobile application may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party, such as when TikTok videos spread debunked conspiracy theories about the origins of the 2019 Novel Coronavirus,” the executive order read.
Since Trump left office, the aggressive action against TikTok stalled. However, the latest hearings on Capitol Hill have shed some light on the internal data risks with the TikTok app.
Trump continued in his statement this week, “Sadly, I’ve been right about everything, and you know what – the Democrats know it, the radical left knows it, the Communists and Marxists within our own country know it. They want to turn our country into a Communist country, [a] Marxist country. They want to turn our country into something that we’re not going to let them have – we’re not going to do it. But we were right on so many fronts, but we’re going to be right again because we’re going to make America great again.”
