An organization that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) is a member of has accepted sizable donations from ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of the social media platform TikTok, which the democratic socialist recently defended from a possible nationwide ban.
Jake Denton, a technology policy expert at the Heritage Foundation, noted that Ocasio-Cortez is a member of the advisory council for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, a nonprofit entity that received $150,000 at the end of last year from ByteDance, according to a lobbying contribution report. “What a coincidence,” Denton said on social media.
Ocasio-Cortez recently remarked on TikTok that a ban of the platform over national security and privacy concerns would be “unprecedented” and said that such a move does not “really address the core of the issue, which is the fact that major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you that you do not know about.” She added that lawmakers should instead pass a broader data privacy bill for social media firms.
“The United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books,” she remarked, asserting that regulators should “actually protect Americans from this kind of egregious data harvesting that companies can do without your significant ability to say no.”
