MADISON, Wis. — U.S. Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-De Pere, joined two two other lawmakers Tuesday in introducing a federal ban on the Chinese-based social media app TikTok over concerns that the Chinese government could collect Americans’ data.
In a statement released with the legislation, Gallagher said allowing TikTok to operate in the United States equates to allowing the USSR to own the New York Times during the Cold War.
“TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting Americans, collecting troves of their data, and censoring their news,” Gallagher said. “No country with even a passing interest in its own security would allow this to happen, which is why it’s time to ban TikTok and any other [Chinese Communist Party]-controlled app before it’s too late.”
The lawmakers say that any data collected by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance could be easily intercepted and analyzed by the Chinese government.
“That TikTok, and by extension the CCP, has the ability to survey every keystroke teenagers enter on their phones is disturbing,” Gallagher wrote in a Washington Post op-ed with U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in November. “With this app, Beijing could also collect sensitive national security information from U.S. government employees and develop profiles on millions of Americans to use for blackmail or espionage.”
UW-Madison instructor Don Stanley added that there is an additional concern that TikTok also allows a direct line of communication from a Chinese-owned company to the pockets of many Americans.
“Imagine during the Cold War, that the Soviet Union would have had the opportunity to come into every American television, with networking, and then customize that networking to topic and issues that were salient to you,” he said. “We would have stopped it in its tracks: No, you cannot advertise in our newspapers; no, you can’t create content that looks like news on our news channels.”
He recommended on the consumer level, TikTok users limit both the time they spend on the app, but also be aware of the content they are consuming or being fed through the algorithm.
“The example that the Center for Humane Technology uses the example of if you’re in China, you’re getting the fruits and vegetables version of TikTok to feed your mind to help you grow,” Stanley said. “If you’re in the west, you’re getting the opium version, the part that’s tapping into the part of your brain that it’s hard to stop scrolling.”
Earlier this month, Gallagher joined his fellow Republicans from Wisconsin’s congressional delegation in calling on Gov. Tony Evers to ban the app from all state-owned phones. In response, a spokesperson for the governor said that the Evers administration continues to defer to law enforcement, cybersecurity, and counterintelligence experts on possible cybersecurity issues like TikTok.
“Our administration and the Department of Administration’s Division of Enterprise Technology take cybersecurity very seriously and regularly consult the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and counterintelligence specialists in making decisions about cybersecurity for state government devices,” the spokesperson said.
The governor’s office also confirmed that the Evers campaign did manage a TikTok, but under ethics laws, it could not have been hosted on a state-owned phone.
COPYRIGHT 2022 BY CHANNEL 3000. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS MATERIAL MAY NOT BE PUBLISHED, BROADCAST, REWRITTEN OR REDISTRIBUTED.
