(NewsGlobal.com)- Although Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill argue over whether or not to completely prohibit the Chinese-controlled platform for national security reasons, Democrat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (NY) has presented himself as a TikTok advocate.
News reports reveal that Bowman will conduct a news conference on Capitol Hill with hundreds of TikTok content producers making the case for preserving the application in the U.S. The attempts from both parties to prohibit TikTok have been criticized by Bowman, who has dubbed them “fearmongering.”
Bowman responded to Monday’s remarks by Intelligence Committee head Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who warned reporters that Beijing might utilize TikTok for propaganda and manipulation. Bowman said that Facebook should be subject to similar investigations in light of alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Bowman added that Biden would be deprived of a means of reaching out to young people.
According to the report, leading Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee Rep. Gregory Meeks (NY) has spoken out against a Republican plan that would give the president the authority to prohibit the Chinese social media app TikTok.
In response to claims that it engages in surveillance, TikTok said it had spent more than $1.5 billion on cybersecurity.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew testified before Congress and revealed that the business exchanges data on American users with a parent corporation linked with the Chinese Communist Party.
At a hearing before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chew said that personnel of ByteDance’s Douyin, China’s equivalent of the social networking app, had access to US data. According to the CEO, this will continue to be an option until Tiktok finishes Project Texas, an initiative to relocate data from the United States to servers inside the country.
TikTok “in the past” provided user data to China, the company’s CEO acknowledged in a separate statement.
Around 150 million people in the United States use the social networking application. Concerns that the app exchanges user information with the CCP has been voiced by Republicans for quite some time.
