WASHINGTON—United States Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, today joined The Big Money Show on Fox Business to discuss the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.
Partial Transcript
Hagerty on his concerns with the CCP owning Americans’ data: “I think the first thing to do is to make clear to our audience what this exposure and what this risk is—that’s of great concern—and I think it’s a great bipartisan concern here. You saw the vote coming out of the House [of Representatives], and the National Security laws in China require any Chinese-owned or controlled company—as long as the data resides on their servers somewhere, doesn’t matter where it originates, it could originate in the United States—but that data is susceptible to Chinese Communist Party surveillance. That’s the concern here that we’re trying to get at. We don’t want Americans data subjected to Chinese Communist party surveillance. I backed legislation that would stop the Chinese Communist Party from having access to Americans’ genomic data, DNA data. So, this is the concern that we’re trying to get at here. What we don’t want to do though, by the same token, I don’t think we want to see more power go to the hands of companies like Meta, Google, etc. What we want to see is the users of TikTok to have an option here in America, but just one that doesn’t expose their data to the Chinese Communist Party. That’s the needle that we’re trying to thread right here […] I think that it’s got to be very specific as it’s crafted, and it’s got to get through the Senate here. But I think it has to be very specific that it is entities that are foreign adversary controlled entities like the CCP in China, like Russia, like Iran, like North Korea. Those types of entities are what we should be focused on.”
Hagerty on his concerns of further enabling Big Tech to censor Americans: “The sentiment that Senator [Lindsey] Graham raised is a very real one, because we’ve seen these large platforms like Meta with a bias towards censorship of conservative voices. That’s what Senator Graham is speaking to, and I think that is a very real concern. We don’t want to create more market power for those entities that are inclined to come in and censor American speech. We saw Meta’s involvement [in] censoring the New York Post article back in the 2020 elections with regard to Hunter Biden’s laptop. We don’t want that type of situation to occur here, and I think that the sentiment that Senator Graham raised is very real.”
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