Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr has encouraged the United States government to ban the popular social media application TikTok in an interview with Axios.
TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has gained prominence as its users have topped nine figures, with nearly 30% of political candidates for Senate joining the platform.
Despite the rising numbers of users, Carr, a critic of China and Chinese-owned companies, thinks there’s an inherent risk with data on American users being sent to China. He previously warned Apple and Google to remove the application from their app stores.
There isn’t a “world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the [Chinese Communist Party],” Carr told Axios.
Numerous reports have claimed that user data is being sent to China, and though a TikTok executive told Congress in September that the data is safe, many dispute that assertion.
“I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban,” Carr told Axios.
TikTok told Axios in a statement that the company is “confident” they will be able to “satisfy all reasonable national security concerns.”
“Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner,” a TikTok spokesperson said.
Former President Donald Trump also expressed a desire to ban TikTok before a potential partnership with American companies Oracle and Walmart was announced.
After Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, President Joe Biden dropped the idea of a ban, though at least one prominent Democrat still supports the U.S. taking a tough stance on TikTok, Huawei and other Chinese companies that would allow for “the ability for China to have undue influence” on Americans, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“This is not something you would normally hear me say but Donald Trump was right on TikTok years ago,” said Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia.