(NewsNation) — In a Tuesday interview on NewsNation’s “On Balance with Leland Vittert,” Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul said he believes a ban on the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok would be unconstitutional, violate users’ First Amendment rights and make the U.S. look like China.
“Well, there is this little sticking point, and it’s called the Constitution, the Bill of Rights,” Paul, who serves on the Senate’s Committee on Foreign Relations, told NewsNation’s Leland Vittert. “You can’t just pass a law and take someone’s property.”
Paul also warned that banning TikTok would also set a dangerous precedent, with the U.S. beating “the Chinese Communists by becoming (like) Chinese authoritarians and banning it in our country.”
For years, lawmakers and government officials in Washington have said TikTok, which has over 150 million active users in the U.S., poses national security concerns, citing the Chinese government’s close relationship with owner ByteDance and potential to access private data or conduct “influence operations.”
The House of Representatives will vote Wednesday on whether to force ByteDance to divest its ownership of TikTok within 165 days. While the move has bipartisan support, some in the GOP have come out recently against it, most notably former President Donald Trump, who said Monday on CNBC that he opposed the ban on the grounds it would strengthen Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”
Trump’s comments came as a surprise, given it was his administration that initially attempted to ban TikTok in 2020.
When pressed by Vittert on whether allowing TikTok to operate as is would expose Americans’ data to the Chinese government, Paul said there’s no proof yet that would happen.
“If you’re going to accuse a particular company of a crime, and you’re going to say that they’re giving it to the government of China,” he said, “you would have to prove that.
“We know that the Chinese government does demand things, but we don’t know that any information really is going from TikTok to any of these people in China.”