Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told Newsmax on Thursday that other states should "absolutely" follow his state and consider banning government employees from using the video-sharing app TikTok on state-issued devices.
"This is clearly a problem," Paxton said during an appearance on Newsmax's "American Agenda." "President Trump brought it up years ago and, of course, now the director of the FBI has talked about it up in Michigan, so it's clearly a problem and the Chinese are taking advantage of it.
"As long as we allow them to do it, and we are doing that, we're going to have problems with sensitive information and personal information being grabbed by the Chinese government, usually for bad purposes."
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday ordered all state agencies to ban employee use of TikTok on government-issued devices, joining a growing number of GOP governors who have taken action against the Chinese-owned social media platform.
In a letter to Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, Abbott urged the passage of legislation that would permanently codify the directive and ensure that there are similar requirements for local governments.
TikTok, which has more than 85 million U.S. users, is owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members and has a subsidiary owned, in part, by the CCP, the governor's office said.
"China [is] clearly not a friend," Paxton said. "They're not just a competitor in the business place or in the marketplace, but they have a goal of being dominant, and it's at our expense, and giving them personal information or important information that they can use for their benefit is, in my opinion, a really bad idea.
"We need to find ways to stop that immediately, because, every day that goes by, they're getting information on all of us, and in the end, it's likely to be used for purposes that are not good for our country."
Paxton also said that former President Donald Trump was frequently the first to take note of things that were later widely acknowledged.
"He was out first with a lot of things, and a lot of people made fun of him, but the reality is, he was ahead of his time on that issue; and if we had listened to him, then we could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and a lot of information being handed over the Chinese Communist Party," Paxton said.
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