Nearly half of American adults support a ban of the Chinese-owned app TikTok, a social media platform wildly popular among young people, which has shown itself to be a national security threat and a danger to children and teens.
Some 47 percent of respondents to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll said they at least somewhat supported “banning the social media application, TikTok, from use in the United States,” while 36 percent opposed a ban, and 17 percent said they didn’t know.
TikTok influencers Florin Vitan (L) and Alessia Lanza perform a video for the social network TikTok (Photo by MIGUEL MEDINA/AFP via Getty Images)
As far as political alignment, 58 percent of Republicans favored a ban, while 47 percent of Democrats said they supported it, the poll showed.
The survey also revealed that there are grave concerns among Americans over the global influence of China, a hostile foreign country.
The poll was conducted nationwide, surveying 1,005 American adults, including 443 Democrats and 346 Republicans, and had a credibility interval of roughly four percentage points in either direction.
“We’ve taken unprecedented actions to safeguard protected U.S. user data, and we will continue working to build a safe, secure, and inclusive platform to ensure the positive experience of our users in every corner of the country,” a TikTok spokesperson insisted.
Still, TikTok is viewed by many as simply Chinese surveillance and psyops thinly veiled as a social media platform. It has shown itself to be a danger to kids and teens, a national security threat, and having meddled in U.S. elections.
Additionally, TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, has already been caught snooping on U.S. and UK journalists in multiple instances.
As Breitbart News previously reported, ByteDance employees have obtained the private user data of U.S. journalists. The Chinese company was also recently discovered having tracked a UK journalist via her cat’s TikTok account, which didn’t even have her real name on it.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump sought to ban new downloads of the Chinese app, but a series of court decisions blocked the rule from going into effect.
While the U.S. government mulls over what to do about TikTok when it comes to its citizens, it has been more proactive about protecting itself, barring military and TSA employees from having the Chinese app on their devices.
You can follow Alana Mastrangelo on Facebook and Twitter at @ARmastrangelo, and on Instagram.