Recently, Senator Marco Rubio called out Representative Val Demings, a Democrat opponent, for her questionable social media usage.
The Florida Republican roasted Demings’s usage of TikTok, a social media subsidiary of a giant Chinese corporation based in Beijing. Given the obvious national security concerns, Demings “should know better,” according to Rubio spokeswoman Elizabeth Gregory.
“Val Demings should know better,” Gregory declared, “every time Demings shares a TikTok, she encourages Americans to use a platform that leaves their personal information more vulnerable to China.”
In contrast to Demings, Rubio has been urging action against TikTok, emphasizing “the serious threat to personal privacy and [American] national security [that] TikTok poses.”
Demings’s campaign has received several million dollars in donations, and she has spent approximately $6M so far on advertisement buys.
Some of her fundraising hauls have been fairly recent, with $12.2M in donations pouring in between the months of April and June. Demings credits her “digital fundraising army” for helping her campaign raise millions of dollars in a relatively short period of time.
Demings also defends her use of TikTok, dismissing Rubio’s national security concerns.
According to Christian Slater, a spokesman for Deming, the representative is present on TikTok “for one simple reason”: the voters are on TikTok.
“The Demings campaign is working relentlessly to meet voters wherever they are,” Slater continued, “in person or online, in our fight to defeat career politician Marco Rubio.”
Earlier in July, Rubio called for the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to launch an investigation into TikTok, as well as ByteDance, the giant Chinese corporation that serves as the parent company to the social media platform.
Rubio stated that the investigation would be supported by the fact that the Chinese company had made “repeated misrepresentations” regarding its handling of American data.
Leaked audio from internal TikTok meetings revealed that Chinese engineers have access to an unprecedented amount of U.S. user data, as revealed in a controversial Buzzfeed report.
