Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher announced last month that he would be retiring from congress in mid-April. But until then, he’s a co-sponsor of the TikTok bill which just passed in the House. Today the NY Times published an interview with Gallagher in which he makes the case for passing the bill.
Representative Mike Gallagher: There are two threats. One is what you could call the espionage threat. It’s data security — using the app to find Americans, exfiltrate data, track the location of journalists, etc. We have incidences of this happening already that are in the public domain. That’s a serious threat, but I actually think the greater concern is the propaganda threat. If TikTok continues to establish itself as the dominant news platform in America, and if the algorithm remains a black box and subject to the control of ByteDance and by extension the Chinese Communist Party,…
