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U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) joined The Ingraham Angle to discuss the national security threats posed by TikTok. See below for highlights and watch the full interview on YouTube and Rumble.
On the national security threat posed by TikTok:
“TikTok is popular, people like it, and the reason why they like it. What makes TikTok so good, is that it has this artificial intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. It’s literally reading your mind. The more you use it, the more it knows about you. The problem is not that TikTok has that. The problem is that ByteDance and their engineers in China are the ones that own that artificial intelligence.
“I don’t use TikTok. But people that use TikTok, no matter where you store that data, you could store it in a safe in the United States, those engineers in China have to have access to the data. They control the brain of TikTok. They control that artificial intelligence.”
On FBI Director Christopher Wray agreeing TikTok is a national security threat:
“The point I made today, and the FBI director agreed, is if the Chinese Communist Party goes to them and says, ‘We want you to defeat Donald Trump, we want you to put out messages that are anti-Trump and pro-Biden,’ ByteDance has to do it.
“They’re a company in China. By Chinese law, they have to do it. If they say, ‘We want the data of all your users that live in Florida,’ they have to give it to them. They don’t have a choice but to do it. That is Chinese law. As long as ByteDance owns the artificial intelligence that powers TikTok, we have a Trojan horse living inside our country.”
On why banning TikTok isn’t a First Amendment issue:
“There’s no First Amendment issue here. We are not going after TikTok because of what the videos say. It’s because of the conduct of their parent company. Their parent company is under the complete control of a foreign government that’s hostile toward the United States.
“The day [the Chinese Communist Party] decides to weaponize that against us, to convince soldiers not to go fight, to convince their families that it’s not worth going to fight, to get involved in our elections, to spread things that make us fight against each other and further divide this country…, or to convince American teenagers to kill themselves because the world is about to end, [ByteDance] has to do it. If the Chinese tell them to do it, they have to do it.
“It’s the conduct, not the content, that we’re talking about. TikTok…is controlled by the Communist Party. It’s that conduct that we’re going after.”
On the comparison of Facebook to TikTok:
“I don’t like the fact that Facebook and Google and all these people have all that power. We should confront that problem, too. But the answer to that problem is not to have a Chinese Communist Party-controlled company in the marketplace. Those are two separate problems, and I think we need to deal with both of them.
“If TikTok decides, ‘We’re no longer going to associate with ByteDance, we’re going to find another company not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, they’re going to provide us with the algorithm and the AI from now on,’ problem solved. The problem is, they won’t do that.
“They can’t do that, or they don’t want to do that, because ByteDance is the parent company, and they’re in China. Why would they give up 100 and something million Americans whose phones they are in? Why would they voluntarily give that up?”