The Chinese Communist Party via TikTok has promoted ’terrible‘ messages to American children and is a ’very dangerous thing,’ he argues.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that he plans to uphold the divest-or-ban law on TikTok as the Chinese-owned social media platform went dark on Saturday evening.
On Sunday, Johnson spoke to NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and weighed in on TikTok’s decision as well as comments made by incoming President-elect Donald Trump that he would issue an executive order on the matter quickly after taking office on Monday.
“No, I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told the outlet, responding to a question about the message Trump would send if he pauses the ban. “And when President Trump issued the Truth post and said save TikTok, the way we read that is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership.”
Last year, members of Congress passed the ban on TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, over concerns that the platform is collecting sensitive data and information on Americans. The law required that ByteDance, which has long had an internal Chinese Communist Party committee with its own secretary, divest from TikTok within 270 days of the law being passed, which was Jan. 19.
“It’s not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about,” Johnson told the outlet. “It’s the Chinese Communist Party, and their manipulation of the algorithms.”
Those algorithms, he said, have been “flooding the minds of American children with terrible messages, glorifying violence, and anti-Semitism, and even suicide and eating disorders,” describing it as a “very dangerous thing.”
Last week, the White House’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, said in a statement that how the United States will handle the TikTok ban is now up to Trump, who wrote early Sunday morning “SAVE TIKTOK” on his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Also early Sunday, the president-elect that he would issue an executive order upon taking office Monday that will “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”
