Fox Business guest praises TikTok for letting misinformation about abortion spread “completely untouched”
Fox took a brief break from criticizing TikTok over ties to the Chinese Communist Party to salute the app’s lackluster moderation policies in spreading right-wing misinformation
Published
Citation From the May 3, 2023, edition of Fox Business’ Varney & Co.
STUART VARNEY (HOST): Our next guest says she’s more scared of American — American — social media companies, than TikTok. Evita Duffy wrote that, and she joins me now. All right, Evita, why are you more scared of U.S. companies than TikTok?
EVITA DUFFY (STAFF WRITER, THE FEDERALIST): So, I just want to say right off the bat, Stuart, that I am not undermining the threat of TikTok. I’ve personally uncovered Chinese influence campaigns on the app, it’s definitely a threat. But what I say is, American social media companies are even more of a threat.
We saw during the "Twitter Files" what happened. That the Deep State is in collusion with American social media companies to interfere in our elections, to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, to shadow-ban conservatives, to promote the Russian collusion hoax, to silence doctors during COVID. This is all very concerning, and our only defense against this kind of tyranny is free expression. And TikTok is actually doing free expression better than American companies, and I’ll give you an example.
Lila Rose is a pro-life activist. She did a video on Instagram where she said that it is never medically necessary to have an abortion. That was slapped with a fact check on Instagram, but was left completely untouched on TikTok. And there are example after example of things just like that.
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DUFFY: I will say, think about when do Republicans, Democrats, and the Deep State all agree on something? Hardly ever. And they all agree that they want TikTok gone, and I don't think it’s for our benefit. They claim it's for our own security, for our own privacy. They're collecting data — our government is collecting data on us all the time, through all of their agencies. They want to get rid of TikTok because they can't control TikTok, and I don’t think that’s a legitimate reason. And I also think it sets a really negative precedent. China bans apps, Americans don’t ban apps. Americans don’t try to suppress content that they can’t control, I think that’s communist behavior.