Chinese-controlled TikTok has gained remarkable influence over America’s economy and society in the span of seven years.
Small-business owners are particularly attached to the app, with about half of them advertising on the platform.
And for understandable reasons — almost a third of the country uses TikTok semi-regularly.
But while TikTok tries to appear friendly to Americans, its true purpose is to serve the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese businesses at Americans’ expense.
Don’t take my word for it.
Just look at the company’s new scheme to sell cheap products made in China directly to Americans through the app.
This attempt to follow in the footsteps of Chinese fast-fashion firms Shein and Temu is deeply troubling.
First, it will undermine the American businesses TikTok claims to help.
Who will spend $20 on a T-shirt made in America when he or she can buy a Chinese-made T-shirt for $4?
Who, for that matter, will even be aware of American goods on the market when TikTok’s algorithm begins — as it surely will — to favor Chinese sellers?
So much for TikTok “celebrating” American small business, as it trumpeted in May when committing $1 million each to the Hispanic Heritage Foundation and Black Girl Ventures “to support Black and Brown” entrepreneurs.
This venture’s economic consequences will be swift and serious.
Shein alone already commands 75% of the US fast-fashion market.
When TikTok enters the fray, domestic producers will struggle to maintain even a small minority of the overall share.
It shows that TikTok’s “support” for Main Street America, including its strategic funding of small businesses suing Montana for banning the app, is anything but selfless.
TikTok’s e-commerce foray is also problematic because it will make American consumers complicit in slavery and genocide.
How do you think Chinese producers proffer their dirt-cheap prices?
Some do it by not paying their workers. Instead, they source their goods from concentration camps in Xinjiang, where the Communist Party subjects Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic groups to forced labor — as well as systematic rape, sterilization and indoctrination.
Importing slave-made goods to America has been illegal for decades, but that ban is sometimes difficult to enforce.
Congress gave the Biden administration additional tools to crack down on such imports, especially from China, when it passed my Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in December 2021.
But Shein and Temu have worked around the law by selling goods in small shipments whose value falls below the $800 threshold for customs inspection and tariffs.
Congress can and should eliminate this loophole. I have a bipartisan bill, the Import Security and Fairness Act, to do just that.
But until it passes, Americans who buy through Chinese e-commerce platforms, including TikTok, will unwittingly participate in one of the greatest atrocities of the 21st century.
Add this to other incriminating discoveries, and the evidence against TikTok is overwhelming.
ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, was caught in October using the app to spy on American journalists.
Then The New York Times reported TikTok stores Americans’ private information — including driver’s licenses, addresses and device IDs — in China, where ByteDance employees can access it.
A few days later, Forbes reported TikTok also stores its content creators’ tax information and Social Security numbers in China.
In short, TikTok’s public-policy chief blatantly lied under oath when he denied US data is stored in China.
But this goes beyond trust. It’s ultimately an issue of national and economic security.
China’s totalitarian regime hates the United States and is bent on displacing us as the world’s greatest power.
If TikTok users believe their sensitive data are safe in Beijing’s hands — that Beijing wouldn’t use those data to influence, coerce, extort or spy on them in the case of a geopolitical conflict — they need to think again.
This is really straightforward. TikTok is lying to Americans, abusing their data, threatening America’s long-term economic interests and aiding and abetting genocide and slavery.
We have to decide what’s more important, short-term gains or the long-term good of our country.
For years, we have prioritized the former in pursuit of profit and customer convenience.
But we aren’t just producers and consumers.
We are also citizens who owe a debt of gratitude and loyalty to our neighbors and the nation in which we live.
And we are human beings who have a moral obligation not to fund the horrors going on in Xinjiang.
If we don’t ban TikTok after this year’s revelations, we will do more than throw a bone to our greatest geopolitical adversary.
We will broadcast the decline of American patriotism and the blunting of our leaders’ moral sense. That would be a real tragedy.
Marco Rubio represents Florida in the US Senate.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
