Officials in Washington have failed the American people by not providing protection against TikTok’s massive data harvesting operation and ties to Beijing, GETTR Chief Executive Officer Jason Miller discussed in an opinion piece published in Newsweek on Wednesday.

“In the last few months, we have learned that at least 300 employees at TikTok's China-based parent company, ByteDance, previously worked for Chinese-controlled media—and some still do. Leaked audio from internal meetings showed that U.S. user data had been repeatedly accessed from CCP-controlled mainland China. And scarier still, a Chinese-based team planned to use TikTok to monitor the personal locations of certain American citizens,” Miller wrote.

“It's no secret that any business operating in China, Chinese-owned or otherwise, is required to acquiesce to Chinese surveillance and technology-stealing, which makes the trove of data that TikTok is collecting a ripe, low-hanging target for the Chinese government.”

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“In other words, the Chinese Communist Party has the capability of putting together terrifyingly accurate psychoanalyses on a generation of young Americans based on billions of their social media interactions on the app. Until we take aggressive action, the next generation is a sitting duck to manipulation and blackmail from a Chinese government mapping out digital blueprints of their minds.”

“Until Western governments decide to take the tough steps necessary to shield their citizens from the prying eyes of the Chinese government and sever the connection between TikTok and Beijing, there is little we can do to stop the Chinese from spying on us.”

While TikTok has denied the allegations, Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr on Tuesday urged lawmakers to immediately ban the platform, saying there was no way to have “sufficient evidence” that American user data was not being sent back to Beijing and the CCP.

GETTR now boasts nearly 6.5 million users across the globe in 193 different countries. There have been over 260 million livestreaming views since the release of the feature, along with over 65 million Vision views - the short video feature that is a direct competitor to Instagram Reels and TikTok.

A new report from Comscore data and covered by Rolling Stone found that GETTR was the only alternative social media platform which saw its year-over-year (YOY) unique visitors increase between September 2021 and September 2022.