Vice President Kamala Harris refused to comment on the future of TikTok Wednesday, dodging questions about whether the popular social media app should be banned or regulated by the federal government.
For more than two minutes, Harris, 59, riffed on her time in the Senate, “disinformation” and “Russia’s interference in the 2016 election” when asked by New York Times reporter and CNBC host Andrew Ross Sorkin about what should be done with the Chinese-owned app.
“Well, I’ll step back for a moment and say that one of the things that should keep all of us up at night is the level of myths and disinformation that is rampant and has been facilitated in a most extreme way, by social media. There’s no question about that,” the vice president said at the New York Times’ annual DealBook summit.
“I was a member of the United States Senate – [where] I was for four years. My favorite committee – I served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where we would meet in a SCIF, in a bipartisan way, and one of the reasons it was my favorite is because when we walked in there, people just took off, no cameras, no public, people took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and we were just Americans, not Democrats or Republicans,” Harris continued.
“When I was on that committee, we investigated Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. And then we declassified our findings. And it’s available for anyone here to read who’s interested.. Russia interfered in the 2016 election, targeting specific groups of Americans with dis- and misinformation with an intention to undermine the American people’s confidence in our institutions,” she added.
By this point, Sorkin interjected, trying to get Harris back on topic, but she continued to deflect.
“I think we should take very seriously the fact that not only individuals, but nation states, take very significant measures to undermine the democracy of the United States of America, and it is incumbent on us with one of the highest, if not the most important priorities being national security, to take seriously any attempts to undermine our security as a nation. Period,” Harris said.
The veteran journalist again tried to pin Harris down on TikTok regulations.
“In the view on the social media piece, though, you don’t have a specific view on TikTok itself?” Sorkin asked.
“I’m not commenting on that,” Harris replied, adding that she is not on TikTok but “many of the people in my family are.”
Her refusal to take a position on government-imposed TikTok restriction comes after the White House came out earlier this year in support of the RESTRICT Act, which would give the president the power to ban or prohibit foreign technology over national security concerns.
TikTok, which has 150 million users in the US, is owned by the Chinese-based company ByteDance.
More than 30 states have banned the app from government-owned cell phones and computers over concerns that the Chinese Communist Party could gain access to user data, which it is legally allowed to compel ByteDance to provide.