Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) told China’s TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew during a senate hearing on Wednesday that Tennessee is not going to be rolling out “the welcome mat” for a proposed company HQ in Memphis.
“I know some of you had to be subpoenaed to get here,” Sen. Blackburn began during her opening statements at Wednesday’s Senate Hearing on Online Child Safety.
“Mr. Chew, I want to come to you first,” she continued. “We’ve heard that you’re looking at putting a headquarters in Nashville — what you’re going to find is that the welcome mat is not going to be rolled out for you in Nashville.”
TikTok CEO Shou Chew (Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)
TikTok Astroturfed crowd outside Congress (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
“There are a lot of people in Tennessee that are very concerned about the way TikTok is basically building dossiers on our kids,” Sen. Blackburn said.
Elsewhere in her statement to the TikTok CEO, the senator asserted, “Children are not your priority. Children are your product.”
Executives from TikTok, Meta, X/Twitter, Snap, and Discord testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the exploitation of children online on Wednesday.
As Breitbart News reported, Chinese-owned TikTok is widely viewed as Chinese surveillance and psyops thinly veiled as a social media platform that FCC Brendan Carr has described as “China’s digital fentanyl.”
The app, owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company subservient to China’s Communist regime, has already proven itself to be a danger to U.S. kids and teens by pushing harmful trends and “challenges,” is considered a national security threat, and has been caught meddling in U.S. elections.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has also admitted to snooping on U.S. journalists, with one former executive warning that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had “supreme access” to all data held by the Chinese tech company, including on servers in the United States.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and X/Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.