Virginia Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the threat social media platforms such as TikTok pose to personal and national security, misinformation impacting the intelligence community, and the crypto fallout following FTX's collapse.

Video Transcript

RACHELLE AKUFFO: Some good news for Americans with student loans. President Biden is extending the pause on student loan payments through June 30. The president's plan to cancel $10,000 of student loan debt for most borrowers is currently tied up in the courts. Biden tweeting, quote, "I'm confident that our student debt relief plan is legal, but it's on hold because Republican officials want to block it."

Now the extension of the pause, Biden says, will give the Supreme Court, quote, "time to hear the case in its current term." And if the high court rejects Biden's plan or doesn't rule on the case by June 30, student loan payments will resume 60 days later. That's according to the Department of Education. Dave.

DAVE BRIGGS: Three words you don't often, if ever, hear from the left side of the aisle-- Trump was right. That, however, was the admission of Democratic Senator Mark Warner when it comes to the former president's warning concerning China-owned social media app TikTok. We're thrilled to welcome in Senator Warner from the great state of Virginia. Senator, great to see you. Like million of others--

MARK WARNER: Great to see you.

DAVE BRIGGS: --I'm a parent who watches my kids endlessly, sometimes mindlessly scrolling TikTok. Why should I and those watching be concerned?

MARK WARNER: Well, let me give you three reasons. First, I think every parent, and for that matter, every user of TikTok, ought to realize that the TikTok that we get in America, or for that matter, anywhere else in the world other than China, is a very different product.

What happens in China is, there is a TikTok that encourages you to be scientists, that says good things about President Xi. It focuses on STEM education. It's kind of like the eat the spinach version of TikTok that go to the Chinese people, whereas the rest of the world gets this addictive TikTok that may emphasize a lot of things that are maybe not as attractive that you would want as a parent, number one.

Number two, TikTok is this, at a level, even greater than, say, Facebook was at its peak, is absorbing enormous amounts of information about any user, literally down to the keystrokes, to your eye movements. Not only the information in your posting, but all kinds of things that are happening in the background. And a whole lot of that information, no matter what they say, because the code is being written in Beijing, that information is ending up somewhere in China.

And the third thing is-- and I don't think most folks have focused on this-- is that TikTok is literally like a communications network. And I'm-- and the Communist Party in China, the laws require that any company, their first allegiance is not to shareholders or customers, but to the Communist Party. So the Party can affect dial up or dial down. I'm not saying they create the content.

But you may suddenly-- if we were suddenly in a conflict over Taiwan, you could be assured the Communist Party would say, well, we're going to de-emphasize any content that appears on TikTok that might say positive things about Taiwan, and actually do the reverse. So there's the problem of what we're getting versus what the people of China are getting. There's the focus that most parents have in terms of, oh, my gosh, all my kids' information is somehow being stored in a foreign country.

But third-- and I don't think this has gotten nearly enough focus-- is that this literally is a 21st century communications network, and you've got somebody adjusting the dial out of Beijing that really is putting a particular political point of view into the atmosphere.

DAVE BRIGGS: So you say that information is winding up in China. What type of information could they be getting? How could it be compromised? How could it be weaponized by the Chinese?

MARK WARNER: Well, remember, the Justice Department has been trying for two years to find a way to make sure there was a complete separation. Now, one of the reasons I've not gone as far as some of my colleagues in terms of saying complete and total ban, although we will point out already, the American military has said, we don't want our soldiers using TikTok, so I'd take that under advisement.

But my concern is, if you've got the guys and gals who are writing code, writing that code in Beijing, I fear that no matter what they say about having a wall that keeps all this information somehow separate, I'm enough of a techie to know that if you're dealing in and writing the code, you're going to get access to a lot of that data. So I'm afraid how that information could be potentially used to leverage people's behavior, to expose things that are inappropriate.

And just the same way we were concerned about a lot of our information being monetized or manipulated by Facebook, I think you ought to have those same concerns and even more so when we're talking about TikTok. And then there's this issue in terms of misinformation and disinformation, dialing up or dialing down the content that you may be receiving based upon Communist Party policies. We saw an example of how this kind of misinformation can have horrendous consequences.

A few years back when, in Burma, which is now called Myanmar, the government there used Facebook as a way to incite violence against what was called the Rohingya minority in that country. Facebook acknowledged that was a problem. They ultimately moved to try to correct it. But that ability to literally create violence in the case of the Rohingya virtual genocide because of misuse of these platforms, we have to realize that as a potential.

Now, I'm not saying that's happening on TikTok today, but I am saying, if, at the end of the day, the Communist Party and President Xi can dial up or dial down the content that your kids may be seeing, that would worry me.

DAVE BRIGGS: Well, it's interesting that a Republican senator actually agrees with you on this. That's nice to hear-- Senator Marco Rubio. But what-- you say you don't want an outright ban. What can Congress do? And if you could, what should parents do that are out there wondering, wait, should I keep my kids off this app?

MARK WARNER: Well, first of all, one of the reason Marco and I agreed are-- I'm the chairman, and he's the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee. We see in a way that I can't share all the details some of the enormous challenges that TikTok poses. I've said-- and my kids are now in their early 30s and late 20s, so I can't completely regulate what they're doing. But if I had young kids, I wouldn't want them on TikTok.

The only reason why I've not gone, for example, as far as Senator Rubio has at this point is I want to see, I want to give the Justice Department at least the chance to somehow make the case that they can have this separation of information, and that your kids and our personal data is not being stored in Beijing.

But even if they were able to prove that, they still have the secondary problem of TikTok being used as a communications network that, ultimately, the information can be dialed up or down, based upon the whims of the Communist Party of China. That really bothers me.

DAVE BRIGGS: Quickly, I want to get your take on what's happening in a Delaware courtroom today as the FTX bankruptcy hearing gets underway. And this is a complex web that's been weaved together. It looks like a lot of fraud. What can Congress do there to assure the next one won't happen?

MARK WARNER: Well, I am afraid that we may see a number of additional failures coming out of crypto. I've tried again to keep an open mind, the idea that a distributed ledger and blockchain technology offers a lot of potential. I've seen that most unfortunately, there's been a lot of manipulation in this field. I've not seen a lot of the kind of, I got to transfer money to my grandmother in Kenya on a Sunday.

That kind of usage really hasn't taken place. I think we may see other failures along the way. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, has brought some actions. I hope they will bring more. I think we've got to take a look at things like the so-called stablecoins. Are there really an equivalent of a liquid dollar behind each one of those tokens? So I think there's a lot of work to be done. I don't want to close off the potential of this distributed ledger technology. But clearly, what we've seen so far with the commingling of funds that took place with FTX, that's plain old-fashioned fraud.

DAVE BRIGGS: Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, really great to have you here on Yahoo Finance. Happy Thanksgiving, sir.

MARK WARNER: Happy Thanksgiving. Take care.

DAVE BRIGGS: All right. Thanks for coming on.