GOP Sen. Hawley urges Biden admin to ban TikTok due to Israel-Hamas war content concerns

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on Tuesday wrote to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen asking the Biden administration to ban the Chinese-owned TikTok due to the company's handling of content involving the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas.

"TikTok—and its parent company ByteDance—are threats to American national security," he wrote to Yellen in a letter NBC News obtained. "The popular video-sharing app harvests vast amounts of data from Americans’ personal devices, data which then flows overseas to our main geopolitical rival."

Hawley went on to point to the tendency of younger Americans to be more sympathetic to the Palestine cause, including their great willingness to regard Hamas's Oct. 7 raid on Israel as justified.

"While data security issues are paramount, less often discussed is TikTok’s power to radically distort the world-picture that America's young people encounter. Israel’s unfolding war with Hamas is a crucial test case," he added. "According to one poll, 51% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 believe that Hamas’s murder of civilians was justified—a statistic notably different from other age cohorts. Analysts have attributed this disparity to the ubiquity of anti-Israel content on TikTok, where most young internet users get their information about the world."

He then opined that the shift in position among younger Americans was in line with the foreign policy inclinations of Beijing and the app was effectively working to "propagandize Americans."

"I urge you, and the other members of [Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.], to swiftly conclude your review and ban all ByteDance-controlled apps currently available to U.S. users. The matter is as simple as that," he concluded.

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter.