WASHINGTON – Sen. Marco Rubio belongs to a group of lawmakers who are calling for a ban on TikTok over alleged propaganda about the Israel-Hamas war.
Last year, Rubio introduced legislation to ban TikTok from operating in the United States. Most recently, Rubio told Sean Hannity that TikTok’s “misinformation and indoctrination” was responsible for college students’ opinions after the Oct. 7 attack.
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“The Marxist bias on TikTok reflects more than left-wing thought among millennials and Generation Z. It reflects the app’s subservience to the world’s most powerful Marxist regime: the Chinese Communist Party,” Rubio wrote in an opinion piece published by The Washington Examiner on Friday.
Rubio also wrote that claims that TikTok intentionally fosters support for Hamas are primarily anecdotal at this time because its algorithms and data are a secret.
“That doesn’t mean such reports are unreliable or untrue. In fact, they fit with a pattern of behavior by the company to echo the Chinese Communist Party’s line and silence dissenters,” Rubio wrote.
Sen. Josh Hawley, of Arkansas, agreed with Rubio and he recently sent a letter to U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warning her about TiTok’s influence.
“While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world picture that America’s young people encounter,” Hawley wrote adding that a recent Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll showed the influence and analysts attributed it to “anti-Israel content on TikTok.”
TikTok reported removing videos that violated the platform’s “policies around violence, hate speech, misinformation, and terrorism, including content promoting Hamas.”
China established diplomatic relations with Israel in 1992 and is a buyer of Iranian oil. Chinese diplomats did not condemn the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas.