Republican Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard blistered the Biden administration for using social media influencers to spread its messaging on key issues.
In subsequent appearances on Fox News’ “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Hawley and Gabbard both took issue with using social media in an attempt to control the narrative around the crisis in Ukraine, as well as the fallout for Americans at the gas pump.
“They’re afraid of the truth. They’re afraid of even a single voice coming out as challenging the power-elite, questioning them, daring to hold a dissenting view. And they’re afraid because their arguments are so weak that they know they will not withstand the light of the truth,” said Gabbard. “And this is why we’re seeing not only still most of the mainstream media very vigorously defending and pushing the Biden propaganda — it’s not enough. They’re going to YouTubers; they’re going to TikTokers. It’s not enough that they also have Google and Big Tech basically working for them and with them to control what information we see and what information we don’t see. None of this is enough, because they won’t stop. And it’s not just the Biden administration, it’s not just Democrats, it’s the power-elite, it’s the [neoconservatives and neoliberals] working together to make sure that every single voice in this country, anybody who’s got a platform, is spouting their narrative that they want people to see and hear, their propaganda — and this is what’s so dangerous about the place that we’re in right now as a country, where this idea, this principle, this foundation of freedom of speech, freedom of expression, is directly under threat and under attack.”
Hawley criticized the Biden administration for using “teenagers” to perform essential communication, saying that it highlighted the administration’s incompetence and disorder. Hawley took particular issue with the use of TikTok because of the social media app’s ties to the Chinese government.
“This shows just how incompetent President Biden is … that now he’s asking teenagers to do his job for him,” said Hawley. “I mean, think about that for a second, this is the President of the United States. It’s bad enough that he’s going around begging dictators to give us oil because he won’t allow Americans to produce our own energy, but now he’s going to actual teenagers, and begging them, on a Chinese-owned social media app, to do his job. I mean, I’ve never seen anything like this. You cannot make this stuff up.”
“This is a White House that is fundamentally unserious when it comes to the China threat. They don’t understand the China threat; they haven’t taken it seriously. And listen, I tried to get TikTok banned in this country until it was sold to an American company or to another company that was walled off from Beijing, because the truth is, Beijing has a backdoor into TikTok. All of the data that TikTok collects on you if you use it, the Beijing government, the Communist Chinese Party, can see it and use it. This isn’t an app that anybody ought to be promoting, let alone the President of the United States. So, it is incredibly irresponsible; it is like him sharing our intelligence with Chinese officials, which he apparently did. So, it’s a pattern here where this White House doesn’t know what’s going on, they blunder from one chaotic moment, crisis to another, and now here they are asking teenagers to do their job for them on Chinese social media.”
White House officials, including Press Secretary Jen Psaki, briefed a number of influential TikTokers over Zoom on Friday, giving them talking points on the crisis in Ukraine and skyrocketing gas prices to present to their audiences, as The Daily Wire reported.
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Source: Dailywire
