U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explains why she opposes banning TikTok
Do I believe TikTok should be banned? No. First of all, 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. And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it. Some of the arguments about banning TikTok have come with respect to discussions around Chinese surveillance and utilization of data that is tracked and the enormous amount of tracking on US citizens and data that is harvested by TikTok. And 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, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don't know about without really any significant regulation whatsoever.
In fact, the United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books. The EU, for example, has something known as the GDPR, which really forces an enormous amount of protection on individual users and the amount of data that companies can collect about you without your knowledge. So to me, the solution here is not to ban an individual company, but to actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no. And usually, when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing. And I can tell you that Congress has not received a classified briefing around the allegations of national security risks regarding TikTok. So why would we be proposing a ban regarding such a significant issue without being included in on this at all? It just doesn't feel right to me. And additionally, this case needs to be made to the public.
We are a government by the people and for the people. And if we want to make a decision as significant as banning TikTok, and we believe or someone believes that there's really important information that the public deserves to know about why such a decision will be justified, that information should be shared with the public as well. But frankly, I think a lot of this is putting the cart before the horse, because our first priority should be in protecting your ability to exist without social media companies harvesting and commodifying every single piece of data about you without you and without your consent.
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