#White House trade adviser Navarro blasts TikTok as ‘national security threat’

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro blasted Chinese-owned social media app TikTok a “national security threat” and accused its American chief of being a “puppet CEO.”

The critique comes after President Trump on Friday announced he planned to ban the app from operating in the US amid concerns the popular video platform could share American user data with the Chinese government.

“It sounds like fun but guess what? Every time you sign up for TikTok, all of your information is potentially going right back to the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese military and the Chinese government,” Navarro said Saturday on Fox News’s “Justice with Judge Jeanine.”

“They can use these social media apps to steal your personal information, your business information and they use these social media apps to track you and surveil you and monitor your movements” he said, calling it a “national security threat.”

The popular video app is owned by the Beijing-based internet company ByteDance and last month tapped Kevin Mayer, a former Disney exec, to become its US CEO.

But Navarro, who is perhaps the harshest China critic inside the White House aside from the president himself, implored TikTok users not to “fall for” the company’s lobbying efforts, and called Mayer a “puppet CEO.”

“Here’s what I would ask the American people: If they’re using TikTok and they hear the president is going to basically ban that, get on the Trump train with that, because that app you’re using, fun as it may be, is dangerous,” he said.

Government officials have been reviewing TikTok’s potential as a national security risk and Joe Biden’s campaign last week instructed staff to delete the app from their phones, citing privacy and security concerns.

The app has repeatedly denied the charge it could be weaponized to spy on Americans or interfere in the US election but as a Chinese-owned company, it is subject to a national security law that would require them to hand over sensitive data if requested by Beijing officials.

India banned TikTok in June, citing similar privacy concerns that it said pose a threat to India’s security.

About 60 percent of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the US are ages 16 to 24, the company said last year.

On Friday, reports emerged that Microsoft was in talks to purchase TikTok from ByteDance.

“First of all, Microsoft is the software that the People’s Liberation and the Chinese government run on,” Navarro said.

“Second of all, Microsoft helped China build its great firewall that is used to surveil and monitor and censor and imprison sometimes the Chinese people.”