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Negotiations between the Biden Administration and TikTok regarding the company's data security have reportedly been delayed due to national security concerns. But the news begs the question: Why are we negotiating anything regarding TikTok when it presents such a clear national security threat?
Some people have gotten the message loud and clear. The U.S. armed forces prohibited the app on military devices two years ago. More recently, on Dec. 5, South Dakota banned TikTok from state-owned devices. Texas and Maryland followed suit shortly thereafter, and other states are taking similar steps.
As these statewide bans snowball, the federal government should immediately ban the app outright in the United States.
The youth of America are at risk. TikTok, owned by the Chinese conglomerate ByteDance, is closely linked to the Chinese government. China's National Intelligence Law forces all Chinese companies to provide the government with any information it requests, including data on foreign citizens. Large Chinese corporations are also required by law to have "Communist Party cells" inside their organizations to ensure that they adhere to the Chinese Communist Party line.
The threat is real. Here in the U.S., TikTok has approximately 100 million active users, and a third of those are 14 years old or younger. That means TikTok is collecting deeply personal information and biometric data on 30 to 40 million young children in America. This data is fed right into the hands of the Chinese government, which controls it for life.
It gets worse: This week, Indiana's attorney general sued TikTok for "deceiving users about China's access to their data" and exposing children to "mature content." "Inappropriate sexual and substance-related content can be easily found and are pushed by the company to children using the app," the attorney general found.
As 60 Minutes reported, the domestic version of TikTok in China is vastly different from the version shipped to the United States and the West.
Douyin, ByteDance's version of TikTok for China, promotes science, engineering, and educational clips to children in their feeds. And they are limited to 40 minutes a day.
Meanwhile, in the West, TikTok's trending videos are vapid, superficial, and often blatantly sexual.
The lesson could not be clearer: China recognizes TikTok's ability to influence children's development, and wields it as a weapon of manipulation.
Perhaps it's no surprise that, when surveyed, most kids in China want to grow up to be astronauts while in the United States, most kids want to grow up to be social media influencers. This is a real problem for the future.
It's true that TikTok's data-harvesting and ad-targeting business model is not unique among mainstream social media companies. American social media companies like Facebook and Twitter have dreadful records when it comes to tracking, data privacy and political bias. But TikTok, with its close ties to China's authoritarian government, takes it to a more nefarious level.
TikTok's adherence to the demands of the Chinese government is well documented. Leaked documents about TikTok's moderation policies show that TikTok moderators are required to censor and remove content worldwide that China's government prefers to censor, such as videos mentioning Tibetan independence, Tiananmen Square, or the banned religious group Falun Gong.
Effectively, TikTok is a tool of the Chinese government to advance China's foreign policy goals in the United States and worldwide.
The head of the FBI recently warned that the Chinese government could use TikTok to "influence American users or control their devices", while the Director of the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center said the Chinese government has attempted to influence and interfere in American elections. With vast troves of data on Americans at their fingertips via TikTok, the Chinese government has a remarkable amount of power to influence and target American voters.
TikTok's massive userbase of American children, along with its advanced algorithmic manipulation tactics, means that the Chinese government can target and influence not only American voters of today, but also American voters of tomorrow to advance China's own policies and goals in America and across the globe.
Of further concern, in June 2021, TikTok updated its privacy policy so that it can now collect "new types of biometric information including faceprints and voiceprints." Not only is this technology terribly invasive to TikTok users, it's also dangerous. You can change your password if it becomes hacked or compromised, but you can't change your face or voice if those are stolen.
In 2020, the Trump Administration ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok's U.S. assets to an American company, an order that was rescinded by the Biden Administration in 2021. But just reinstating this order would not be enough; there would still be no way to prove that the American user data will not continue flowing back to China.
The only real solution is an outright ban. Bold and immediate action is required to protect Americans, our children, and our democracy from the threat TikTok poses.
Mark Weinstein is world renowned as a leading privacy expert and one of the visionary inventors of social networking. Mark has been quoted in the New York Times, LA Times, Entrepreneur, Business Insider, etc. His recent Wall Street Journal op-ed on Musk and Twitter. His TEDx Talk. Mark is also the founder of MeWe, which he left in July 2022. He is currently writing the book on healing social media, mental health, privacy, civil discourse and democracy. Mark's LinkedIn.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
