NY Democrat Ocasio-Cortez goes on TikTok to argue against banning the video app

WASHINGTON - It was a bruising week for TikTok on Capitol Hill, but as momentum grew among Democrats and Republicans to

ban the Chinese-owned video app over national security concerns,

it gained an influential ally: Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York.

Ms Ocasio-Cortez, known for her own large social media following, waded into the debate just before midnight on Friday by posting a video on – what else? – TikTok.

The video, her first on the platform, had garnered 1.5 million views by early Saturday.

In it, she argues that United States President Joe Biden and colleagues in both parties were “putting the cart before the horse” and rushing prematurely to cut off more than 150 million American users from the popular platform.

She does not directly address their concerns that the Chinese authorities could exploit the app to monitor Americans or spread misinformation.

“If we want to make a decision as significant as banning TikTok, and we believe – or someone believes – that there is really important information that the public deserves to know about why such a decision would be justified, that information should be shared,” she says in the video.

She joins an exceedingly small group of lawmakers – all of them progressive Democrats – who have broken ranks with their party to support TikTok.

So far, the congressional defence of the platform has been led by one of her closest allies, Representative Jamaal Bowman, who represents an adjoining district around New York City.

The Biden administration and members of both parties in Congress have warned that Beijing could force TikTok, which is owned by Chinese Internet giant ByteDance, to hand over data on Americans who use the platform.

Dozens of House Republicans and Democrats

castigated the company’s chief executive officer, Singaporean Chew Shou Zi,

in a televised hearing this past week, dismissing his claims that the company was independent. NYTIMES