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Floor Speech

Let's recall that in communist China, there really isn't such a thing as a private company, as much as ByteDance might want to say it is.

The Chinese communist law is very clear that companies in China have to do what they are told to do by the Chinese Communist Party, and that is one of the reasons TikTok is so dangerous.

TikTok, as has been covered by my colleague from Massachusetts, reaches 170 million people; 52 percent of those people say that they regularly get their news from TikTok.

As I have risen on this floor in the past, I have discussed specific cases where the Chinese communists have been pushing their propaganda through TikTok.

Now, let's also bear in mind that we would not allow any American TV, news station--even newspaper--to be able to own as much of the American marketplace as TikTok has today--170 million people. Current law says that you can only own 39 percent, for example, of the TV marketplace across the country. That would roughly equate to about 50 million households in the United States--far above what we are seeing here with what TikTok has access to. So if we are not going to allow Americans to be able to have such broad access to our population, why on Earth would we allow the Chinese Communist Party to do it? And by the way, the Chinese Communist Party has no First Amendment rights in this country.

ByteDance was given 270 days to make a deal. The Communist dictator Xi Jinping clearly did not want it. They tried to lobby us. They avoided getting a deal done. President Trump came into office. They are still avoiding getting a deal done.

The people who are taking on the liability here are the companies that are the facilitators. I urge those companies to reconsider. You should think carefully about what you are doing. The law is very clear. TikTok needs to be sold to an American owner to continue operation, not some half-baked plan, as my colleague from Arkansas was describing, where the Chinese Communist Party would still have influence on the TikTok algorithm, still have the ability to push their propaganda to the American people. That cannot happen. We need to make sure that the Chinese Communist Party cannot do that in our country.

Again, we won't allow other TV or radio stations to have that much access. Why on Earth are we doing it with the Chinese Communist Party? It is absolutely ludicrous.

We need to keep the pressure on. We need to make sure that TikTok is sold. I echo my colleague's comments with regard to any sort of future Chinese ownership that would allow them to be able to continue to do this. We need to make sure this is no longer going to threaten our young people.

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