🎙️ Voice is AI-generated. Inconsistencies may occur.
Recent reporting exposing the nefarious nature of TikTok's data harvesting operation—which is almost certainly funneling Americans' personal data right back to Beijing—has missed the point on what the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is really up to. They're creating a predictive model for how to defeat the West ... and we're helping them do it.
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.
In 1950s Cold War America, the potential of a foreign communist government subverting and infiltrating American society was known as the "Red Scare." And it was just that—a scare. Fast forward to today, and we seem to be largely oblivious to the fact that the Chinese Community Party has already achieved this devious goal, making their way into nearly every home in America disguised as a fun, if not addicting, short-form video cell phone app.
TikTok is designed to allow users to consume and share culturally relevant videos and memes from their phone. The difference between TikTok and other popular apps like Instagram and Facebook, however, is that TikTok is owned by a Chinese internet conglomerate called ByteDance, a company with a cozy relationship with the Chinese state government. 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.
The Chinese realize they have struck gold with TikTok. Not only is it the fastest growing social media platform in the world, but a new survey released this year found that 67 percent of U.S. teenagers said they use TikTok, making it now the most popular social media app among teens. Nearly one-fifth reported they use it almost constantly. And one in three TikTok viewers in the United States regularly use it as a source of news, which carries its own set of obvious vulnerabilities.
What the Chinese Communist Party has the ability to collect through TikTok's billion users is far more advanced and threatening than what a standard hacker might collect, such as email addresses, credit card numbers, addresses, or passwords. You should assume that the CCP already has this information. Through TikTok, China's communist leaders, using well-established surveillance laws, have all of the information they need to compile detailed and comprehensive psychographic profiles on users' behaviors, interests, relationships, and personal lives based not only on what users share, but who they share with and what they consume. They can also control what news is being shown to young Americans, shaping their world view.
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. TikTok has repeatedly denied these claims, telling CNBC they have never provided user data to the Chinese government.
This isn't the stuff of hypotheticals or conspiracy theories. Former national security officials this month told Bloomberg the app is a major national security threat and exposes the United States to further espionage.
Importantly, an emerging consensus in Washington is starting to see the danger. Leaders from both parties have increasingly questioned why TikTok is allowed to operate in the United States with reckless abandon, without any protections of U.S. users' data, given the obvious national security risks. The U.S. House has advised staff from using the app, and FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has publicly called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores.
Unfortunately, while the Trump administration proposed an aggressive strategy against TikTok to rein in Chinese access to young people's data, the Biden administration has been slow in acting and negotiations to reach a security agreement, which would allow the company to keep operating in the U.S., have stalled.
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.
But we are not helpless. Talk to your kids about the dangers of TikTok and why they should stop using it. Keep an eye on what they consume and what they share. Because if the current trends continue unabated, the Chinese government will know our kids better than we do ... and, terrifyingly, even better than the kids know themselves.
Jason Miller is the chief executive officer of social media platform GETTR.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
