Politics

Rand Paul Worries Banning TikTok Will Cost The GOP Young Voters

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Republican Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said a TikTok ban could cause Republicans to “continuously lose elections for a generation,” Politico reported Monday.

“We are in a political world,” Paul told Politico. “We shouldn’t be completely oblivious to the fact that a lot of young people are on there and it is, frankly, their freedom of speech.”

Banning the app, which says it has 150 million American users, could alienate younger voters, Paul said.

Paul has been a vocal opponent of bipartisan initiatives to ban TikTok, raising concerns on the House floor in March that Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley’s No TikTok On United States Devices Act would violate the First Amendment. He’s also opposed the RESTRICT Act, a bill proposed by Republican South Dakota Sen. John Thune and Democratic Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, which would enable the Secretary of Commerce to regulate certain transactions with countries it designates as “foreign adversaries.”

Paul told Politico that others in the GOP may not have fully thought through the implications banning TikTok could have on their performance in elections.

North Dakota Sen. Kevin Cramer, who supports the RESTRICT Act, told Politico that “Rand’s probably right” about young voters but said that just means they “have to go out and make a case” in light of the “national security ramifications and cultural ramifications to [doing] nothing.”

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley said Paul’s argument is “so silly I don’t think it’s worth responding to,” according to Politico.

Paul is backed by GOP donor Jeffrey Yass, CEO of Susquehanna Financial Group, which owns a nearly $33 billion stake in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, according to the New York Post. Since 2020, Yass has given over $10 million in support of Paul.

Paul told the Post in April that his “opposition to censorship and my unwavering support for the First Amendment are consistent, deeply held libertarian beliefs.”

The RESTRICT Act has drawn broader criticism from some who generally support a TikTok ban. Critics say the bill gives the executive branch new powers that could be used against American citizens without directly banning the app.

“We should act decisively to ban TikTok directly. We shouldn’t give new open-ended authority to federal bureaucrats. We should target this threat specifically,” Hawley said in a March tweet.

“The RESTRICT Act eschews almost all notions of checks and balances by granting a vast amount of power to the Executive branch to intervene in all kinds of economic transactions,” Paul wrote in Townhall on Friday. “It would effectively allow the Secretary of Commerce to become the Commissar of Commerce.”