Former Vice President Mike Pence said the US should ban TikTok, calling it a platform that allowed the Chinese government to obtain data on Americans without their knowledge.

“We ought to be banning TikTok. TikTok is a platform for the Chinese Communist government. They are collecting data on Americans every single day,” Pence said Friday in an interview with Bloomberg Television. “Young Americans need to know that their privacy is being compromised by TikTok.”

Pence also delivered a jab at one of his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

“I know that one of my competitors Vivek Ramaswamy in the Republican primary he had rightly described Tiktok as a digital fentanyl for American youth, and this week he signed up for Tiktok. He said he’d met with one of their executives and they changed his mind,” Pence said. “Well they are never going to change my mind.”

Pence’s comments come ahead of a policy speech he will deliver Monday on China. The relationship between the world’s two largest economies has gained growing attention in the 2024 presidential race. Republican candidates, including Pence, have criticized Biden, saying the president needs to take a tougher line with Beijing over a number of issues.

Pence on Friday said Biden had “dropped the ball.”

Still, he said the US should not seek to decouple from China despite the threat it posed.

“We have to recognize that China’s the greatest economic and strategic threat of the United States of America,” Pence said. “I think using access to the most powerful economy in the world, the United States of America, is a means of having China end decades of trade abuses, end intellectual property thefts, stop their military provocations, and end the human rights abuses.

Author: Gregory Korte, Annmarie Hordern and Joe Mathieu