Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has joined TikTok to support the app as Congress works to ban it over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
Congress and the Biden administration have been discussing forcing the sale of TikTok or banning the social media platform over concerns that it is a national security risk.
U.S. senators have unveiled bipartisan legislation to ban the social media app nationwide — and the House Energy and Commerce Committee grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Thursday.
On Saturday, the Democratic Socialist created her first video for the platform, which she also posted to Twitter.
This is not only my first TikTok, but it is a TikTok about TikTok,” Ocasio-Cortez said in the video. “Do I believe TikTok should be banned? No.”
“I think it’s important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be. The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence, from operating in our borders,” Ocasio-Cortez continued. “And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it.”
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is based in China, leading many to believe that the app is a national security threat as it is likely giving data to the CCP.
“They say because of this egregious amount of data harvesting, we should ban this app. However, that doesn’t really address the core of the issue,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.
The far-left politician defended TikTok’s data collection by saying that other platforms also collect “troves of deeply personal data,” often without the user’s knowledge
