Rep. Gallagher: This bill is about foreign adversary control of American social media, not speech. [pLYEuYsgAUa]
On March 11th, Rep. Gallagher joined Fox & Friends on @FoxNews to discuss the Select Committee's recent TikTok legislation that passed out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee unanimously with a 50-0 vote. Read highlights of the conversation below. Will Cain: Have you received a lot of calls from people, as we've heard about, from constituents or kids upset about this potential bill? Rep. Gallagher: We have. Now the good news is for those users of TikTok is that our bill is not an outright ban as TikTok has been lying and telling its users. It is a forced divestiture. What we are requiring is that TikTok separate itself from Chinese Communist Party control which would allow for a better user experience going forward. And the fact that TikTok forced a popup notification on all its users, had them entering their zip code, and then automatically called their representatives and in some cases, TikTok kids threatening suicide on the phone with their representatives. One impersonating one of my colleague's son shows you the dangers of this platform remaining under the control of ByteDance and the CCP. Imagine if we were voting on something like removing permanent normal trade relations from China or authorizing force to defend Taiwan, and TikTok was pushing lies to its users and interfering in the legislative content. They kind of proved the concerns for us in the way they handled this. Will Cain: In the clarification, you're not banning TikTok, you're trying to force the divestiture to take the CCP out of it. Is that possible? Because we hear about the algorithm - it's got backdoors, it's used for privacy invasion, and so forth. Most suspect that it's not even a financial enterprise necessarily. The point of it isn't to make money, but it's to be a Trojan horse for all these other issues. So how do you get that out of TikTok? Rep. Gallagher: It's definitely technically possible or technologically possible. The real question is whether the Chinese Communist Party will allow it to happen, right? And I think if they resist, if the algorithm remains on their version of an export control list, which it currently is on that list, that tells you something very fundamental about how they view this platform. To the point you suggested, it isn't just a way for ByteDance to make money, it's a means of influencing foreign society. Xi Jinping has specifically talked about the power of short form videos to propagate pro-CCP narratives and influence foreign societies. That is the heart of the concern. There's a separate concern about the apps ability to track your location, spy on you, but really, I think the core concern is the opacity around the algorithm and the way in which it can manipulate certain information. We have an outside analysis suggesting that when you compare it to Instagram, certain topics make no sense, topics that are unfriendly to the CCP tend not to appear on TikTok relative to Instagram. // Subscribe to Rep. Gallagher's Channel! Subscribe to Rep. Gallagher's Newsletter! Congressman Mike Gallagher has represented Wisconsin’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2017. Mike was born and raised in Green Bay, where he now lives with his wife Anne and two daughters. Mike served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps, including two deployments to Iraq. Mike also served as the lead Republican staffer for the Middle East and Counterterrorism on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and worked in the private sector at an energy and supply chain management company in Green Bay. Mike currently serves as Chairman of the Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as Chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From 2019-2021 he served as Co-Chairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission. For more information visit: Follow Rep. Gallagher on Twitter: Follow Rep. Gallagher on Facebook: Follow Rep. Gallagher on Instagram: