Time To Ban It: TikTok Isn’t Just Viral Videos, It’s a Dangerous Chinese Communist Party Virus

The time has come for all Americans, regardless of their political party, to recognize the serious threat posed by TikTok and completely ban it.  TikTok is not a harmless app for sharing short videos; it is a tool embedded in the phones of roughly 100 million Americans – more than 30 million of them being minors – that constitutes a real threat to each user’s personal data privacy and is likely used to propagate outright propaganda and influence operations.  The Biden Administration should not be hosting TikTok lobbyists (or “influencers” for that matter) in the White House.  It should be informing them that their days operating in the United States are numbered.

TikTok insists that it is wholly independent of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and that any claims of nefarious CCP activity harmful to Americans are ill-founded.  This is nothing more than a smokescreen.  China’s National Intelligence Law, which was enacted in July 2017, established the “obligation” for Chinese citizens (and companies) to support and assist in work pertaining to national intelligence.  TikTok’s claims of being separate from the CCP matter little; it is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance.  Under the 2017 law, ByteDance is compelled to share information if its CCP overseers ask for it – even if it is the private information of TikTok users, such as names, ages, phone numbers, and emails, or even approximate location and biometric data.  As a former Secretary of State and CIA Director, I can assure you that the CCP has already demanded that information and will continue to demand it.

It gets worse, though, because that’s not the only data the CCP is interested in gathering.  On any social media platform, the information presented to users can be heavily tailored by the engineers and executives who run the application – something Americans are now seeing in detail regarding Twitter.  The same is true for TikTok; only this time, instead of content control being in the hands of far-left progressives, it ultimately belongs to the Chinese Communist Party.

We have seen what this means in practice. TikTok has already accessed the private information of users in order to track specific Americans.  It has already instructed its content moderators around the world to suppress any mention of events like the Tiananmen Square massacre or political movements like Tibetan independence.  And it censored and suppressed content related to the Hong Kong protests.

It's not just about what information is suppressed on TikTok, though; we should also be worried about what content is promoted on the app, especially when so many young Americans use it every day.  In a “60 Minutes” report from November 2022, it was revealed that the “China” version of TikTok is far different from the one available to Americans.  China’s version contains a setting for children, which presents educational and patriotic videos, and is limited to just 40 minutes of use daily.  The American version, on the other hand – the one our children use – has no limits unless they are voluntarily selected by the user, or the user’s parents.  Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita recently sued TikTok, saying that the app exposes children to “drug and alcohol use, nudity and intense profanity.”

Aside from the insidious content that TikTok shows to children, even proper content limits won’t prevent the app from presenting Chinese communist propaganda to Americans. Just last month, Forbes reported on several TikTok accounts that criticized Republicans and praised Democrats in the run-up to America’s recent midterm elections.  Those accounts turned out to be managed by MediaLinks TV, a registered foreign agent and Washington, D.C.-based outpost of China Central Television, the main Chinese Communist Party television news outlet.  Nothing in any of these videos indicated they came from a registered foreign agent. Instances such as these will only become more widespread as TikTok’s influence grows.

We took this threat seriously in the Trump Administration. As Secretary of State, I announced in July 2020 that we were considering fully banning TikTok in the United States. We weren’t able to get this important work done, but we were able to take important first steps that woke many Americans up to the problem.  Since that time, 22 states have taken legal action against TikTok, especially banning its use on government devices.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration has done the opposite. Rather than inform the American people of TikTok’s threat, Team Biden has actively courted the favor and support of popular users on the app.  When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, his team invited popular TikTok stars and even gave them a personal briefing. His Administration also authorized thousand-dollar cash payments to create a TikTok “Influencer Army '' as part of the campaign to get people vaccinated.  And recently, it was revealed that the Administration has hosted TikTok’s lobbyists at the White House several times, even as lawmakers in Congress banned the app on government devices. President Biden and his team do not take this threat seriously and will only use TikTok to further their own partisan political objectives. That puts all Americans at risk.

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