CNN Column about ‘GOP-Led TikTok Ban Craze’ Falls Apart after Senate Unanimously Approves Government Ban

With over a dozen governors moving to ban TikTok from official devices in their states in recent weeks, CNN’s Oliver Darcy went to bat for the Chinese social-media company, quoting an anonymous source “close to TikTok.” In short, Darcy, a media columnist for the network, attempted to cast bipartisan skepticism of the app — and a new bipartisan bill to ban it — as a frankly partisan smear campaign run by the GOP:

In effect, these lawmakers are using TikTok as the face of the Chinese government. By taking an uncompromising position on the app with these headline-grabbing moves, their constituents see them taking a firm stance on China, which has become politically advantageous in the Republican Party.

“It’s playing to the Fox News crowd,” a person close to TikTok, who requested anonymity because they were not publicly authorized to speak on the matter, said on Tuesday. The person noted that many of the lawmakers expressing concern about China’s influence are ironically expressing such sentiments from their Chinese-made iPhones…

That’s the point that TikTok tried to make on Tuesday. Spokesperson Hilary McQuaide said in a statement, “It’s troubling that rather than encouraging the Administration to conclude its national security review of TikTok, some members of Congress have decided to push for a politically-motivated ban that will do nothing to advance the national security of the United States.”

The premise underlying Darcy’s column was patently ridiculous when it was published on Tuesday — and the story has fallen apart even more noticeably since then. Numerous Democratic lawmakers, FBI Director Christopher Wray, director of national intelligence Avril Haines, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and other officials have expressed concern about TikTok in recent weeks. They, and GOP critics of the app, are concerned by TikTok owner ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese government and operations in China, which subject it to Chinese legal requirements to comply with requests for user data.

But to Darcy, the renewed push to address these concerns amounts to an overtly political GOP power grab. On Twitter, he characterized the state-level TikTok bans — implemented exclusively by GOP governors so far — as well as the new bill to ban TikTok from operating in the U.S., as “the GOP-led TikTok ban craze.”

Then, yesterday, the Senate approved, by unanimous consent, a different bill that would ban the use of TikTok from all federal employees’ devices — a development that guts the claim that going after TikTok is a partisan exercise. Although House speaker Nancy Pelosi didn’t commit to taking up the legislation, she said that “it’s very, very important.”

While Darcy is a media columnist, his credulity with regard to his sources at TikTok is a national-security story. Ultimately, TikTok employees — including the individual “close to TikTok” who fed Darcy this story — answer to ByteDance, which hosts an internal Chinese Communist Party committee and has a member of Beijing’s united-front influence networks on its board.

Darcy fell for a foreign malign-influence trick, publishing a story whose premise fell apart within a day. TikTok’s ability to spin this story and sell it to a major media outlet is just as worrying as any of the data-privacy concerns at play here.