Maybe Trump was right about TikTok

Here’s something you rarely hear a Democratic senator say: “Donald Trump was right.” But that’s what Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) is saying now, and it’s all because of TikTok, the popular video app that Trump tried to ban in the waning months of his presidency. “As painful as it is for me to say, if Donald Trump was right and we could’ve taken action then, that’d have been a heck of a lot easier than trying to take action in November of 2022,” Warner told Recode. “The sooner we bite the bullet, the better.” Warner is the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and his problems with TikTok are more than shared by his Republican counterpart, committee vice chair Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio’s been sounding the alarm about TikTok since 2019 — before Trump, even — and he’s still doing it now.

He recently co-authored an op-ed in the Washington Post that called for the app to be banned. In December, he introduced a bipartisan bill with Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) that would do just that: the Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP) Act. “There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company,” Rubio said in a statement. “It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.” The chances that the new ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act will pass and become law in the few weeks remaining in this congressional session are slim to none. But Rubio is likely to reintroduce it in the next session, where TikTok appears to be Congress’s next Big Tech target. The Big Tech antitrust bills that once seemed sure to pass this year are likely dead.