Pete Ricketts: “reserving the right to object, I echo my colleague from Arkansas' comments with regard to TikTok. Let's recall that in…”

“reserving the right to object, I echo my colleague from Arkansas' comments with regard to TikTok. 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.…”