Political Quotes

“Madam President, there are just a couple of points I want to address. I have been watching in the office; I am not here to make a motion or anything, but this is an important topic. We don't do this enough, which is this back-and-forth, so I will be brief. The first is, this is not a First Amendment issue, because we are not trying to ban ``booty'' videos. I don't know if there is a better term for it, but that is not what we are trying to ban. It is not about the content of the videos that are online, it is about the dangers to the national security that are presented by the way that this company functions. And that is what people don't understand and what we owe people an explanation on. The reason why TikTok--and all the social media companies, for that matter--are addictive is two. They collect a tremendous amount of data on the individual user, not just what you are doing but what you are doing across the platform, your pictures, everything. They want to learn from it, but not just because some guy is sitting and reading all this stuff. They feed it into an algorithm that is powered by artificial intelligence. It knows you better than you know yourself. That is why the more you use it, the more attractive the videos become to you, because they know exactly how your mind works better than you know how your mind works--at least the algorithm does. So who owns the algorithm? The algorithm is owned by a company named ByteDance that is in China.…”