The chairman of the investigative committee on China in the US House of Representatives, Mike Gallagher, said today that the social video application TikTok is "an addictive drug that the Chinese government provides to the citizens of the United States".
In an interview with CNN's "Meet the Press" program, Gallagher said that TikTok is: "digital fentanyl, a destructive addictive drug and we are seeing disturbing information about the harmful effect of frequent use of social networks, especially on young women and men here in the United States".
"We have to ask ourselves if we want the Chinese Communist Party to control what is going to become the most powerful media company in the United States. We need to take the ban on certain civil servants using the app on devices they received from the state and extend it to the entire country," said Gallagher.
US Congressman Mike Gallagher,
Tiktok's parent company "Bytedance" responded to the lawmaker's words and claimed that they "contain zero truth".
"The Chinese Communist Party does not have any control, direct or indirect, over the company or Tiktok. We are a private and global company, almost 60 percent of which is owned by institutional global investors and the rest of the company is owned by its founders and employees, many of whom are Americans," the company's statement reads.
Officials in the allied country accused the company and the app of censoring politically sensitive content for the communist government in Beijing, such as the detention camps for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang.
"What if they start censoring the news? What if they start playing with the algorithm to show only what suits the Communist Party?" Gallagher wondered.
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