DeSantis says he’d weigh national TikTok ban if elected

Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis said he would consider a national TikTok ban if elected, amid bipartisan security concerns about the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

“I am inclined to not want TikTok in the United States,” the Florida governor told The Wall Street Journal. “I think it’s creating a security vulnerability for us. I think they are mining a lot of data.”

However, he emphasized he would stop short of instituting something like the RESTRICT Act. The bipartisan legislation, introduced in March, seeks to give the federal government more power to regulate and ban technology linked to foreign adversaries, such as TikTok.

“At the end of the day, I don’t want Big Brother to be getting into everybody’s apps,” DeSantis told the Journal. “It’s about vulnerabilities to our country.”

The Florida governor signed a bill barring the use of TikTok on government and school servers and devices in the Sunshine State earlier this year, as part of a slate of legislation aimed at “curbing the influence” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Florida.  

“We think whatever utility that these applications have is clearly outweighed by the benefit that the CCP gets from data mining and being able to collect information,” DeSantis said at a press conference in May about the new legislation.