This article was originally published in Newsweek.
On June 28, 2022, U.S. FCC commissioner Brendan Carr called on “Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores for its pattern of surreptitious data practices” in a letter to the two tech companies. He states, “TikTok is not just another video app. That’s the sheep’s clothing. It harvests swaths of sensitive data that new reports show are being accessed in Beijing.” As managing director of a cyber security company with a whitepaper focused on TikTok and a former intelligence professor, this announcement falls in line with other behavior exhibited by China and begs the question: is TikTok a trojan horse?
New reports by Buzzfeed and Internet 2.0 reveal that TikTok has the capability to function as a sophisticated collection and surveillance tool that records extensive amounts of personally identifiable information for the Chinese government. Why does this theory stand up to scrutiny? One reason is that data collected in the U.S. has repeatedly been available in China.
On June 30, TikTok responded in a letter to the U.S. Senators admitting, “Employees outside the U.S., including China-based employees, can have access to TikTok U.S. user data.” This is not a surprising revelation in a time without privacy. Institutions like the ACLU in 2020 advocated for Chinese apps TikTok and WeChat to exist on U.S. app stores despite the banning of every major U.S. tech firm in China. The ACLU continues to champion the cause of China and criticize the Biden Administration citing free speech protection. The administration’s position is not a surprise considering Biden himself made declarations on the campaign trail in 2020 identifying TikTok as a “matter of genuine concern” since the “Chinese operation” had “Access to over 100 million young people particularly in the United States of America.”
China has banned all major U.S. tech firms for years, from Google to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit and Snapchat. Even Winnie the Pooh is not safe from censorship, suffering eternal banishment from China internet for his striking resemblance to Xi Jinping. China has expelled or imprisoned foreign journalists and professionals accusing them of espionage.
These actions, along with the data collection practices through TikTok, plant the seed that China is waging an all-out war on U.S. media, corporations, academic institutions and even game companies. When the CCP brutally suppressed and destroyed democratic institutions, organizations and citizens of Hong Kong, anyone who supported the Hong Kong Freedom Protests was attacked, including game companies, the television show South Park and even the Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey was sacked.
Mark Kern, one of the designers for Blizzard, stated, “We are in a situation where unlimited Communist money dictates our American values. We censor our games for China, we censor our movies for China. Now, game companies are silencing voices for freedom and democracy.”
China and Russia Bans
In the Spring of 2022, Russia banned Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Radio Free Europe, the BBC and other news services. Companies in the U.S. responded by banning Russian state media from their platforms: YouTube removed the RT news channel, DirectTV removed RT America and Apple deleted the RT news app.
Recently, in the first face-to-face meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, Blinken told reporters, “We are concerned about the PRC’s alignment with Russia.” He stated that he did not think China was behaving in a neutral way as it had supported Russia in the United Nations and “amplified Russian propaganda.“
It is clear the Chinese government’s actions have a history of misalignment with their stated desires to productively contribute to the global order. The reports of U.S. data collected from TikTok being available in China are simply the latest example. If the U.S. government, as a matter of national security, does not ban TikTok from the U.S. market and U.S. devices, the United States Department of Defense and other U.S. departments need to pick up where it left off and ban the use of TikTok on government and personal devices. TikTok is proving itself to be more than an application. TikTok has the capability for surveillance and influence line-of-effort funded and supported by the Chinese government (and its friends). If U.S. leadership is concerned with influence operations, botnets, misinformation and disinformation campaigns by other foreign governments, why wouldn’t they remove the trojan horse that can allow an enemy in the front door?
