Chris Murphy Calls TikTok’s Chinese Ownership Part of a ‘Dangerous Trend’

Senator Chris Murphy views TikTok’s ownership “by China” as dangerous, he said in a recent tweet, indicating that a high-profile Biden ally in Congress has soured on the app as the administration negotiates a deal that could determine its future in the U.S.

With Republicans expected to pick up seats in the midterm elections this week, this raises the possibility that a bipartisan push to counter TikTok’s national-security impact could gain traction.

Late last month, commenting on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, Murphy took aim at the role of Saudi investors in the deal, calling for a national-security review. The Connecticut Democrat wrote that China owns TikTok, referring to TikTok owner ByteDance’s extensively-documented cooperation with the Chinese government.

“If [the Twitter] deal goes though, two of the most important U.S. social media platforms will be owned, in whole or in part, by China (TikTok) and Saudi Arabia (Twitter),” he wrote. “This is a dangerous trend, and we don’t have to accept it.”

That tweet came several days after a Pew Research poll found that 26 percent of American adults under 30 are regularly getting their news on the app. In a Pew poll earlier this year, close to 40 percent of Gen Z respondents preferred TikTok for online searches instead of Google.

On November 1, Murphy retweeted an interview in which FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called for banning TikTok.

In the interview, with Axios, Carr, a Republican appointee, had said, “I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban.”

While Murphy’s retweet is not itself a statement of the senator’s view on the matter, it suggests that he is comfortable with the case for a ban as he calls for a ramped-up approach to evaluating foreign ownership of apps used by millions of Americans.

A Murphy aide didn’t rule out the possibility that he supports banning the app when asked by National Review, only doubling down on the senator’s previous warnings about TikTok’s ties to China. “Sen. Murphy believes the increasing control that foreign governments have over major social media platforms is a national security concern that the U.S. should take much more seriously — from the Saudis’ stake in Twitter to China’s involvement in TikTok,” that aide said.

Yet even this low-key criticism of TikTok’s China ties can have significant consequences as the Biden administration negotiates a deal to address the data-security risks that the app’s ownership by ByteDance entails. That ongoing review, by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, could bless TikTok’s plans to partner with software company Oracle to protect U.S.-user data from ByteDance personnel in Beijing, who can reportedly access information on U.S. users. The Department of Justice and the Treasury, which are involved in the talks with TikTok, are reportedly pessimistic that a deal would meaningfully resolve the company’s ties to China.

Meanwhile, news reports indicate the degree to which China-based personnel may access U.S.-user data. Forbes reported last month that ByteDance drafted plans to monitor the locations of specific American TikTok users.

TikTok’s Washington-based lobbying team has conspicuously avoided meeting with Republican lawmakers who have expressed alarm about the app’s connections to China, according to Bloomberg. In one noteworthy case, the outlet reported, TikTok lobbyists skipped a meeting with staff for Senator Marsha Blackburn, despite previously having agreed to a meeting, after CEO Shou Zi Chew admitted that engineers in China had accessed the data of U.S. TikTok users.

Murphy could make common cause with Congressional Republicans on TikTok, as other Democrats have done in the recent past. Senator Mark Warner, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, another Democratic TikTok critic, has teamed up with Marco Rubio to address the threat posed by the app, even saying last month that “Donald Trump was right” to push for a ban of TikTok in 2020.