This is Rep AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and this is my first TikTok.
Now, this is not only my first TikTok but it is a TikTok about TikTok.
Now this week, the CEO of TikTok came and testified before Congress as there
is growing rumblings and discussion over a nationwide ban on the app.
Do I believe TikTok should be banned, no.
>> Her advocacy is interesting in that I think we agree with her because there
are some serious constitutional concerns, free speech concerns when
it comes to banning this, there are legal experts who have weighed in.
There are also some concerns about how the congressional
Hispanic caucus took money from ByteDance,
which of course is the company behind TikTok.
ByteDance donated about $150,000 to the congressional Hispanic caucus last year.
But to be clear, I don't think that that is what swayed AOC's decision or
opinion on this matter, especially when you consider that she's one of the top
fundraisers in the Democratic Party, small dollar donors of course.
I don't think that she's in for $150,000.
But nonetheless, before we get any further,
let AOC explain her argument in favor of not banning TikTok.
>> First of all,
I think it's important to discuss how unprecedented of a move this would be.
The United States has never before banned a social media company from existence,
from operating in our borders.
And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it.
Some of the arguments about banning TikTok have come in with
respect to discussions around Chinese surveillance and
utilization of data that is tracked and the enormous amount of
tracking on US citizens and data that is harvested by TikTok.
That doesn't really address the core of the issue,
which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to
collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you don't know
about without really any significant regulation whatsoever.
In fact, the United States is one of the only developed nations in the world
that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books.
>> She's absolutely right about that.
In fact, some political scientists call it information capitalism or data capitalism,
in that you're using a service, you think that the service is free, but
it's not really free because they're gathering your data and
selling it to third parties at a tremendous profit.
So I think that she raised a lot of interesting and accurate points there.
Jake, what are your thoughts?
>> So, I don't think any of the attacks against TikTok are honest.
So is the issue that being owned by China a real issue where they
might transfer data to China?
Yes, it is issue.
By the way, they proposed project Taxes where then Oracle an American
company would make sure that none of the data goes to China.
But all the Republicans dismissed, I'm sorry, not Republicans.
All the politicians dismissed it out of hand.
I said, why?
That looks like an interesting proposal that might actually solve the problem.
In fact, their proposal, the politician's proposal is insane.
They're saying we're going to ban the app entirely.
That would be the biggest freedom of speech violation probably the country has
ever seen and not even clubs.
There's 150 million Americans that are expressing their speech there and
have a library of content where they have expressed speech.
And by the way also have small businesses that they have set up on that,
if they cared about the so called business community, this is where they would go.
Well, wait a minute.
There's tons and there's like hundreds of thousands of small businesses on TikTok,
wiping all of that out.
You're gonna go to the nuclear option first, which is a ban.
That doesn't make any sense.
There's 1,000 other ways to focus on the issue of them not being able
to transfer data to the Chinese government.
So when you tell me that you're not going to any of those more reasonable options
and you're immediately going to the most extreme option.
What you're telling me is this really isn't about transferring data to China.
We just wanna shut this stuff down, okay?
So why do they want to shut it down?
Very good reasons,
Republicans saw that they lost the midterm elections partly because of TikTok.
I'm not exaggerating.
And by the way, also the 2020 election, the increase in younger
view voters both in 2020 and in 2022 made the difference for
the Democrats in the Senate and for Joe Biden to win the election.
If the young people hadn't showed up in a greater number,
Biden would have lost, Trump would be president.
>> That's true.
I mean, the race was much closer in these swing states than I think corporate
media would have you believe?
>> Yeah, I see this stat all the time, three swing states Biden and
only won by 43,000 votes combined in those three states.
If young people hadn't showed up to vote, Trump is president and
the Republicans have the Senate.
So the Republicans are like, kill TikTok at all costs, okay?
Now other business interests like Meta that owns Facebook and Instagram,
they are literally paying for propaganda in a lot of the different media against
TikTok pretending that they are concerned about the Chinese data issue.
No, they're concerned that TikTok is eating their lunch, right?
So Facebook and all of the other mega platforms like Twitter controlled
by an out of control right winger Elon Musk.
Yeah, there's no talk of shutting down Twitter, the bias of Twitter, etc.
>> How Twitter is used to manipulate the electorate.
>> Exactly, how about the bots on Twitter, the trolls on Twitter.
How about the foreign agents on Twitter?
How about the foreign agents on Facebook, right?
These are actually proven facts.
There's been no proven foreign agents on TikTok.
But wait, we're talking about banning them but not the ones that we know had foreign
agents operating on them, because it's a coordinated campaign by all of
the media to attack TikTok, including mainstream media.
They hate the digital media is killing them and now TikTok is the hottest, okay.
Finally get to the corporate Democrats.
The corporate Democrats are like, well, it was nice that we won those elections, but
we have to be a hawk against China.
>> That's right. That's the other part of this, right?
>> This is a Chinese Communist party.
They walk right into a Republican talking point because guys like Biden honestly
are idiots that base their policies and their strategies on 40 years ago,
we have to be tough against communists, right?
All of those 85 year old Democrats agree.
That's half of it.
The other half of it is, they're like, what if these kids vote in primaries,
then none of the corporate Democrats might ever win again in a primary.
So now everyone in power is incentivized to lie to you and
tell you that TikTok is the biggest danger.
Don't believe the hype.
And thank you to AOC and
other progressives rising out of their slumber and going, right.
Yes, these are our voters.
Yes, we should defend them.