United States House of reps member and incoming chairman of a new house select committee on China, Mike Gallagher, has described TikTok as a “destructive and addictive drug” being given to Americans by the Chinese government.
Mike likened TikTok to “Fentanyl”, a drug often used illicitly as a recreational drug, which is sometimes mixed with heroin, cocaine, and the likes.
While speaking about the short-form video platform in an interview, he said, “TikTok is highly addictive and destructive and we’re seeing troubling data about the corrosive impact of constant social media use, particularly on young men and women here in America, and also because it effectively goes back to the Chinese Communist Party.”
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He further disclosed that the U.S government took the right step to ban the app on the devices of lawmakers, and he feels the ban should be extended nationally.
Recall that on December 27, 2022, the U.S. House Administration Arm banned TikTok from all House of Representatives-managed devices, citing high-security risk issues.
The decision follows other moves by states and lawmakers to curtail the use of TikTok by government officials.
The U.S lawmakers described the app as posing a huge security risk to users and also to the country. They have so far expressed concern about the possibility that the Chinese military could demand the private data of American TikTok users for intelligence operations.
Recall that on December 26, 2022, Tiktok’s parent company Bytedance reportedly fired four of its employees over the improper assessment of U.S journalists’ personal data on the platform.
In a report released, the employees accessed the IP addresses of two U.S based reporters via their TikTok accounts, one of which is a staff at BuzzFeed news and the other one a staff at the financial times.
Since 2020, the short-form video platform has been negotiating with the US government on a potential deal to resolve the national security threat, urging that the app should remain available to US users.
Unfortunately, the plea has been followed with widespread apathy and criticism, which has led to an apparent lack of progress in its talks with the US government.
The U.S house of representatives has continued to push for the app to be banned from government devices and potentially more broadly.
In addition to an earlier decision by the Congress prohibiting the installation of TikTok on government-owned devices,19 states have at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices,