New York
CNN
—
The Chinese executive may use TikTok to regulate information on thousands and thousands of other people and harness the short-form video app to form public opinion must China invade Taiwan, FBI Director Christopher Wray instructed the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday.
Wray spoke back affirmatively to questions from Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the panel’s rating member, on whether or not TikTok would permit Beijing fashionable regulate over information and a precious affect software within the match of warfare within the Taiwan Strait.
“The most fundamental piece that cuts across every one of those risks and threats that you mentioned that I think Americans need to understand is that something that’s very sacred in our country —the difference between the private sector and public sector — that’s a line that is nonexistent in the way that the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] operates,” Wray instructed Rubio within the listening to.
Rubio, the highest Republican at the Senate panel, argued that TikTok items “a substantial national security threat for the country of a kind that we didn’t face in the past.”
Wray’s feedback come an afternoon after Gen. Paul Nakasone, head of the USA National Security Agency, instructed the Senate Armed Services Committee that he fearful TikTok may censor movies to form public opinion in some way that threatens US nationwide safety pursuits.
It’s the newest in a full-court press from US officers to sound the alarm about TikTok’s alleged safety dangers as Congress weighs giving the Biden management extra authority to handle the alleged danger posed by means of the platform, as much as and together with banning the app within the United States
TikTok CEO Shou Chew stated this week that the Chinese executive has “never asked us for US user data” and the corporate would no longer supply it if the federal government did ask. Chew additionally stated that “misinformation and propaganda has no place on our platform, and our users do not expect that.”
The corporate has taken voluntary steps to wall off US consumer information from the remainder of its international group, together with by means of internet hosting that information on servers operated by means of the USA tech large Oracle. The corporate could also be negotiating a conceivable settlement with the Biden management that might permit TikTok to proceed running within the United States beneath sure stipulations.
In a commentary this week, a TikTok spokesperson stated a US executive ban would stifle American speech and can be “a ban on the export of American culture and values to the billion-plus people who use our service worldwide.”
– CNN’s Brian Fung and Catherine Thorbecke contributed to this file.
