Nikki Haley is once again calling for a TikTok ban due to privacy concerns

The Republican Party may be having trouble reaching Generation Z, but Nikki Haley, who appeared at a Fox News town hall event on Sunday, said the answer wasn't TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform.

In a conversation with “America Reports” co-host John Roberts, Ms. Haley, the former South Carolina governor and United Nations ambassador, criticized President Biden for posting a TikTok clip on the night of the Super Bowl, in an appeal to younger voters. She also slammed former President Donald J. Trump, her chief Republican Party rival, for failing to limit its use while in the White House.

“President Trump said he would ban TikTok, and when President Xi asked him not to, it fell by the wayside,” she said, referring to Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader. “We should have banned it from the start. It's incredibly dangerous.”

The salvos against both men are part of a broader argument that Ms. Haley has made in recent media appearances and on the campaign trail that it is time for new leadership. Her attacks on Mr. Trump, under whom she served as ambassador, have become especially sharper as the two face a primary showdown in South Carolina on Saturday.

At Sunday's town hall event, Ms. Haley, as she has done before, broke with her party's isolationist wing on foreign policy and blasted the former president for his friendly relationship with authoritarian leaders like Mr. Jinping and President Vladimir V. Putin. Russia. She argued that Putin “knows exactly what he did” with Aleksei A. Navalny, the outspoken Russian opposition leader who died in prison last week, and chided Trump for suggesting he would encourage Russian aggression against U.S. allies in Europe.

“I think that's why it was so damaging when Trump said he would side with Putin and actually encourage invading NATO allies, rather than standing with our allies,” she said.

When a young voter asked her opinion about why she believed the Republican Party had largely ignored Generation Z and new voters, Ms. Haley called it “a problem” and argued that Republicans needed to listen more closely to a demographic group with several problems, such as the environment and debt.

But when asked her thoughts on the Biden White House and Democrats using TikTok for outreach, Ms. Haley renewed her calls for a ban, saying China had access to too much personal data.

“America cannot be the last country to ban TikTok,” she said.

TikTok became a political flashpoint as both Democrats and Republicans accused the app of not doing enough to protect Americans' data. They also said TikTok downplayed its relationship with ByteDance, the app's parent company in China — where domestic laws allow authorities in Beijing to secretly request data from local companies. Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew at a hearing this month and insinuated that Mr. Chew had ties to the Chinese Communist Party, the country's totalitarian ruling party.

Ms Haley has taken these concerns into the campaign and called for a complete ban on the app. In a Republican debate in September, she called TikTok “one of the most dangerous social media tools” and attacked Vivek Ramaswamy, a rival candidate who favors using the app to reach young voters. The two continued to spar over the issue during the debates, with Mr. Ramaswamy pointing out that Ms. Haley's adult daughter uses the app. Ms. Haley called him “scum” in response.

She has periodically called for a TikTok ban during the campaign, accusing the Chinese government of using psychological warfare against American users by posting content on the app that Ms. Haley deemed subversive. In November, for example, she argued that young Americans were more sympathetic to the Palestinian cause because of “pro-Hamas videos on TikTok.” Users had promoted the “Letter to America” – a text written by Osama bin Laden after the September 11 terrorist attacks – on the platform in the early days of Israel's war in Gaza.

“You have members of our younger generation who say they now understand why he did it. That's disgusting,” she said while campaigning in Iowa. “That's not America doing that. That's China doing that.”