TikTok Must be Banned in US and Free World
Chinese law requires all Chinese companies to turn over information to the Communist Party upon request.
The United States recently banned TikTok from all federal government devices over growing security concerns. That is a good start.
TikTok, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned at the beginning of December, is controlled by the Chinese government, which is a national security concern.
TikTok, a video-sharing app owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has, according to TikTok's own estimates, 1 billion users worldwide. In 2021, TikTok had approximately 87 million users in the US, according to Statista. Disturbingly, a recent study found that 10% of US adults get their news from the Chinese app, up from 3% in 2020.
Wray said that China's government can control the app's recommendation algorithm, "which allows them to manipulate content, and if they want to, to use it for influence operations." "All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn't share our values, and that has a mission that's very much at odds with what's in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us," Wray said in a speech at the University of Michigan.
Wray's comments echoed those he made at the Worldwide Threats to the Homeland hearing held at the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee on November 15. "We do have national security concerns at least from the FBI's end about TikTok," Wray stated.
Wray's concerns are not new –actually, they come a bit late. In 2020, President Donald J. Trump, citing similar security concerns, tried to ban the app in the US, in addition to sanctioning the company, but several federal judges ruled against both sanctions and a ban, blocking his attempts. One judge ruled that the ban failed "to adequately consider an obvious and reasonable alternative before banning TikTok" and that the ban was "arbitrary and capricious."
"ByteDance's submission and compliance with Chinese law has rendered it a reliable, useful, and far reaching ear and mouthpiece for the Party and State," the Trump administration wrote at the time in a document motivating the proposed ban. The document cited ByteDance's commitment to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as resulting in "systemic censorship of content across its platforms" and "the harvesting of user data."
In the document, the Trump administration stressed noted:
Chinese law requires all Chinese companies to turn over information to the Communist Party upon request –and ByteDance reportedly employs more than 130 Party members to ensure compliance, among other matters.
The Trump administration stated:
Furthermore, similar to the concerns expressed by Wray, the Trump administration argued,
In April 2021, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley wrote:
According to Adonis Hoffman, a former chief of staff and senior legal advisor at the FCC who has served in legal and policy positions in the U.S. House of Representatives:
President Joe Biden reversed Trump's attempt at banning TikTok, signing an executive order in June 2021 that revoked Trump's proposed ban. Instead, the Biden administration has sought to work out the security concerns with ByteDance through a negotiated deal with the Chinese company that would reportedly allow TikTok to continue operating in the US without any change of ownership.
"Well, I think Donald Trump was right," Senator Mark Warner, D-Va., chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently said.
Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, said in November that the only way to resolve the national security concerns regarding TikTok would be to ban the app. "I don't believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," Carr said. According to Axios:
In October, Forbes revealed that a China-based team at ByteDance had planned to use TikTok to track the locations of an unspecified number of Americans. In December, it was revealed that ByteDance had used the app to surveil several journalists to track down the journalists' sources.
According to Texas Governor Greg Abbott:
Also in December, Indiana became the first U.S. state to sue TikTok, for misleading users about the Chinese government's capacity to access their data and showing mature content to minors.
"The company's ownership of TikTok is problematic for two reasons," wrote Republican Senator Marco Rubio and Republican US Representative Mike Gallagher.
In China, the content available on TikTok could not be more different. China serves up the "spinach version": science, physics, engineering and patriotism. In the US, TikTok serves up the "opium version." Tristan Harris, a former Google employee, said of China's approach to TikTok on CBS' 60 Minutes:
"If you're under 14 years old, they show you science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, patriotism videos and educational videos," said Harris of the content served by TikTok within China, adding that Chinese children were limited to only 40 minutes a day on the app.
TikTok urgently needs to be banned from the US and the rest of the free world.