News

Trump Jr. Pushes Congress To Pass ‘Hardcore’ Anti-China Restrictions To Protect U.S. Citizens Online

   DailyWire.com
Former US President Donald Trump's son Donald Trump Jr. speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference 2022 (CPAC) in Orlando, Florida on February 27, 2022.
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP via Getty Images

Donald Trump Jr. pushed Congress this week to bolster legislation related to its efforts to restrict Chinese-controlled TikTok by adding new “hardcore” restrictions that would prevent all social media companies from allowing the private data of U.S. citizens to fall into the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.

Trump Jr.’s remarks come after a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act this week. The bill would allow the U.S. to take action against TikTok and other foreign adversaries, and empowers the Department of Commerce to review, prevent, and mitigate information communications and technology (ICT) transactions that pose undue risk to U.S. economic and national security.

While lawmakers consider the RESTRICT Act, TikTok continues to work with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) — the interagency committee responsible for reviewing certain transactions involving foreign investment in the U.S. to determine their effect on U.S. national security — to look for ways to address the issues raised by lawmakers without implementing an outright ban. Former President Donald Trump took executive action toward the end of his time in office to ban TikTok from the U.S. but courts later struck it down and the effort was abandoned by President Joe Biden.

TikTok has now launched a plan called “Project Texas,” a multi-billion dollar corporate restructuring plan in which “TikTok’s American operations would be siloed and monitored by an in-house committee called TikTok U.S. Data Security—leadership for which would be approved by the U.S. government,” Texas Monthly reported. The plan is called “Project Texas” because all of its data operations for the U.S. would be run by Oracle, which is headquartered in Texas. The plan would also force TikTok to provide full visibility of its source code and machine learning algorithms and would require that the results of all audits be provided to CFIUS.

“We’ve got to figure this TikTok thing out,” Trump Jr. said in an exclusive statement to The Daily Wire on Wednesday. “But I got to thinking, well hold on just a second, a lot of these social media companies have China issues and if we’re going to do something here, it needs to apply to all of them.”

Trump Jr.’s statement to The Daily Wire comes after he publicly called on Congress on Tuesday to take action to prevent all social media companies from allowing U.S. user data from going to China.

“While we’re going hardcore on TikTok regulations, how about NO American data flowing through China for ANY social media company?!” Trump Jr. tweeted. “No letting Facebook, IG, Twitter or anyone else off the hook for data security and privacy in whatever ends up happening.”

Two former Trump administration officials — Matt Pottinger, deputy national security adviser; and David Feith, deputy assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs — wrote a piece in The New York Times toward the end of 2021 explaining that Chinese communist dictator Xi Jinping is trying to make the Chinese Communist Party “the world’s most powerful data broker.”

They explained that Beijing is acting in a hyper-aggressive manner to accomplish this goal by “exerting new extraterritorial power over global data flows and putting foreign companies operating in China in a legal bind — all while absorbing other countries’ data by means licit and illicit.”

Facebook revealed in 2018 that it had “data-sharing partnerships with at least four Chinese electronics companies” that dated back to 2010. The New York Times reported that Facebook gave “private access to some user data” to Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei, which is now banned in the U.S. because of the serious threat that officials say it poses to U.S. national security. The report said that the data that China collected from Facebook included information on users’ “religious and political leanings, work and education history and relationship status.”

CLICK HERE TO GET THE DAILY WIRE APP

When U.S. social media companies like Facebook are not turning over users’ data to China, China is using its sophisticated internal internet-data surveillance network to mine social media platforms “to equip its government agencies, military and police with information on foreign targets,” The Washington Post reported.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) and Ranking Member Marco Rubio (R-FL) sent a letter last month to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demanding answers to numerous questions about the four data-sharing partnerships that it had with Chinese entities.

The senators said that it appears that the company has known for the last several years that 90,000 developers in China had access to significant amounts of sensitive user data. The senators alleged that China also got “user IDs, photos, as well as contact information and even private messages.”

Internal company documents found that Facebook acknowledged that the hostile foreign nations that obtained access to private U.S. user data included state actors “known to collect data for intelligence targeting and cyber espionage,” according to the senators.

Got a tip worth investigating?

Your information could be the missing piece to an important story. Submit your tip today and make a difference.

Submit Tip
The Daily Wire   >  Read   >  Trump Jr. Pushes Congress To Pass ‘Hardcore’ Anti-China Restrictions To Protect U.S. Citizens Online