Snippet: Senator Mark Warner’s News Conference Regarding TikTok ☇

Senator Mark Warner (D-Virginia) held a news conference on Tuesday regarding legislation intended to help ban TikTok and one bit stuck out to me (5:30 on the video):

Truth is, with a hundred million Americans daily on TikTok, on an average of 90 minutes a day, this is an issue. I imagine most of you would like your [television] networks to get 90 minutes a day from a hundred million Americans. We’ve got to make sure that we take care of that national security base concern.

It could be nothing, him playing to the crowd of reporters and media-folks, but the skeptic in me wonders if this isn’t just about any potential national security threat. We never hear concerns of people spending hours on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. I wonder if talk of TikTok bans also have pressure from those entities that are losing attention from Gen Z and Millennials, such as cable providers, broadcast networks and their parent companies, and even other social media products.

Do I have concerns about China’s influence on Americans and tech as a whole? Absolutely. However, if lawmakers were serious about privacy, safety, and security, they’d pass broad legislation against data brokers, tracking, data retention, and other creepy things across all sorts of businesses, not just focusing on one social network based in China.