Democrat Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia did something maybe no other Democrat senator has done. He admitted that former President Donald Trump was right.
Warner was talking about the popular video-sharing app TikTok during an interview with “Fox News Sunday.” He said the Chinese-owned app is a major threat from security and privacy standpoints.
“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.”
And this isn’t the first time the good senator acknowledged Trump was correct in his efforts to ban the app. He made comments very similar last month to the Sydney Morning Herald.
“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.”
These comments from the senator come at a crucial time when Republican lawmakers and the FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr have called for a ban on the social media app over concerns about how TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, handles information.
FBI Director Christopher Wray has also talked about the threat with 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.
He also addressed the dangers surrounding TikTok.
“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.
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
