 Let's go to the next clip, which is about Vivek Ramaswamy joining TikTok after the influencer turned MMA fighter Jake Paul apparently talked him into it. Let's pull that. TikTok is banned on government-issued devices because of its ties to the Chinese government. Yet you join TikTok at the dinner with boxer and influencer Jake Paul. Should the Commander-in-Chief be so easily persuaded by an influencer? So the answer is I have a radical idea for the Republican Party. We need to win elections and part of how we win elections is reaching the next generation of young Americans where they are. So when I get into office I've been very clear kids under the age of 16 should not be using addictive social media. We're only going to ever get to declaring independence from China, which I favor if we actually win. So while the Democrats are running rampant, reaching the next generation three to one, there's exactly one person in the Republican Party which talks a big game about reaching young people and that's me. This isn't curiating because TikTok is one of the most dangerous social media apps that we could have and what you've got I honestly every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber for what you say because I can't believe they hear that TikTok situation. What they're doing is these 150 million people are on TikTok. That means they can get your contacts, they can get your financial information, they can get your emails, they can get your text messages, they can get all of these things. This is very important for our party and what we've seen is you've gone and you've helped China make medicine and China not America. You're now wanting kids to go and get on the social media that's dangerous for all of us. You and you are in business with the Chinese that gave 105 and 5 million dollars. We can't trust you. We can't trust you. We can't have TikTok and TikTok and we can't demand it. This is very important, Mr. Ramashwama, you have 15 seconds. I think excuse me, you have 15 seconds, Mr. Ramashwama. Thank you. I think we would be better served as a Republican Party if we're not sitting here hurling personal insults and actually have a legitimate debate about policy. Obviously there are several dimensions to this policy debate and some of them are stupider than others. I just find it remarkable that this has been identified as a problem by both political parties for several years at this point and there's been a lot of fighting over it and this nonsense that they tried to do in the Trump administration where they're going to like get a big deal for Oracle to do the server provision for TikTok, which didn't seem to address any of the problems but would make a whole bunch of money for Oracle. Basically, the criticism here that I think is the most valid is that free speech and free markets do not require you to allow an authoritarian foreign government to own and control a media entity in the United States. In fact, we've already forced the Chinese to disgorge one social platform, which was Grindr, which was acquired by a Chinese-controlled company a few years ago and that was reviewed by the SIFIUS Committee in the Treasury Department and found that that was national security risk and they were forced to sell the app back to a U.S. owner. That didn't interfere with people's ability to access Grindr, but it did ensure that we were protecting this platform that contained a lot of information from Americans from being controlled by a hostile foreign entity. I think it is a real concern that the TikTok algorithm, which is a black box, gives the Chinese government, which is unelected, a lot of ability to influence the way in which information is received by Americans. I don't think we would have allowed the Soviets to do that during the Cold War. It feels to me like there's a relatively narrow policy area here where there's some talk of whether you could use the existing law that was used for Grindr, whether you could use that on TikTok because of some U.S.-based entities that they've already acquired, saying that TikTok is a formerly U.S. company that was acquired. But even if it wasn't, you could have a new law and you could have a solution where you don't take TikTok away from anyone, but you make sure that it is not controlled by the Chinese government, which it seems to me like there shouldn't even be a libertarian objection to because we're not here to protect the association rights of the communist Chinese government. One thing I'm curious about if you don't mind, Josh, is in your view and in the stuff that you have read, what do you think the harm caused by TikTok and TikTok's access to American's data is? Do you mind just going into a little bit of detail there? Because I so frequently get frustrated by this conversation, this debate, because it's like this is bad, but people infrequently expand on what specifically is bad about it. So my main concern is about the algorithm and the content that people are viewing, more than it is about the user data. I think that, first of all, we don't know the extent to which that they are making algorithmic choices that are promoting messages that are favorable to the Chinese government or suppressing messages that they don't like. But the other thing is that when they control this platform that half of Americans are using, they can do that and flip a switch in the future, and it takes years to rest control of it away from them. So I think it's worth doing, even if we haven't identified something that they are doing yet, because especially if we got into a situation, if there was a war over Taiwan, for example, where the tensions were even higher between the US and China, I don't think we'd want them having that sort of power. As for user data, I'm not that concerned about them having large volumes of data on lots of ordinary people, which is probably a very little value to the Chinese, and there are supposed to be certain privacy protections that are created by the Apple and the Google App stores. I don't have a good technological sense of how foolproof that stuff is. But you certainly could have specific targets of Chinese surveillance, where it might be useful to have access into some relatively small number of people's phones. And I think that could be a concern. But my main concern is about TikTok as a media company rather than TikTok as a company that has user data. Yeah, TikTok is like a propaganda machine that can just easily be dispensing bad information to people in the event of a Taiwan invasion. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, let me say this. It's a legitimate concern for sure. It is important to be real precise and dig down into the details of what it is the government would be banning. There's a parent company that owns TikTok that is based in China and also runs a Chinese version of TikTok, which is much different. There's a separate company based in the US that supposedly runs the US version, and they say there's a firewall. It's unclear how strong that firewall is. I would want any sort of ban on manipulation of the public through this kind of propaganda you're talking about to be pretty well proven out and something that we the public would be able to see instead of what we tend to get, which was the law that was proposed to ban TikTok in the first place. I encourage people to go watch the stream we did on this, which was a sprawling law that was throwing in trying to regulate crypto and Bitcoin and all telecommunications infrastructure. These things just get all jammed together into this big power grab. That's what I as a libertarian get really nervous about anytime we start regulating social media, even if it's potentially a hostile social media. If you can prove that there's some sort of intentional propagandizing happening from a hostile foreign government, that's one thing, but to Liz's point, it can't be vague and has to be extremely targeted. Yeah, I wouldn't want the government regulating the algorithm. First, I don't really trust the government to do that. Then also, even if the government did impose a regulation, I don't know how we would ensure that TikTok under Chinese control was following the regulation. What I want is ultimate American control and ownership over the company. Our Constitution and our culture of free speech requires that people be able to do things like decide what kind of information they want to disseminate on their media platform. I don't want to take that out of the private sphere. I actually want to move it into the private sphere so that it's not the Chinese government, so that it's some private American entity doing that. I think it's also worth lingering on the idea that the federal government is going to regulate whether teenagers have access to social media. That seems like one of the crazier ideas that is just routinely floated out there on that stage. I think Vivek, he has it in for the young people in general between that and his proposal to make everyone serve in some sort of civil service in order to be able to vote until they're aged 25. He's going on TikTok with Jake Paul, but I don't think he's courting the youth vote. In fact, he wants to outlaw it. Thanks for watching that conversation with Josh Barrow about the recent GOP debate.