A four-hour drive home in November 2020 was harrowing for the Schotts.
They had just learned that their 18-year-old daughter, Annalee, had taken her own life at the family farm in Colorado.
Everything seemed fine when they FaceTimed her that morning to let her know they'd be home from visiting family in Texas at about 11 p.m. Now, they wanted to be with her instantly but still had four hours to go.
“It was the longest, most hellacious drive we’ve ever done,” Lori Schott told The Epoch Times. “It was just like a horrible dream.”
“I was in the car for hours, trying to process this. I remember I told my son: ‘It’s not true. She’s in the barn. She’s with animals. This can’t be true. She couldn’t have done that.’”
For months, Ms. Lori Schott wondered why her daughter chose to end her own life and what she could have done as a mother so things might have turned out differently.
After 1 1/2 years, she finally found the strength to browse Ms. Annalee Schott’s journals. On a page titled “TikTok,” her daughter wrote, “Technically if I kill myself, the problem would be gone.” Ms. Lori Schott believed that the page contained quotes from the app.
A few months later, Ms. Lori Schott hired a company to break into her daughter’s phone.
The mother then found the answer: “I can open her TikTok page, and I would feel the same way.” Even two years after Ms. Annalee Schott’s passing, her TikTok feed was still saturated with depression-related and suicide-suggestive content.
But, when one of Annalle’s friends came home from college and visited Ms. Schott in 2022, she revealed to Ms. Schott that both she and Annalee had watched a live-streamed suicide on TikTok. They decided to delete the app afterward, only to download it again about a week later.
“TikTok just took over her brain of who she thought she was,” Ms. Lori Schott said. “To me, it figured out who she was and what her weaknesses were, and it fed on that.
“Those constant feeds to her on TikTok are still to this day—anxiety, depression, ‘you have no future.’
“And that’s wrong.”
Ms. Annalee Schott also had accounts on other social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. But in terms of content, “TikTok was absolutely the worst,” her mother said.
Concerns about the hugely popular Chinese-owned video app have been bubbling for years. Besides its effects on young people’s mental health, lawmakers, security officials, and experts have sounded the alarm that the app’s data can be accessed by Beijing and that the communist regime could use the app to run influence campaigns and spread disinformation.
Harmful Content
Beijing-based tech firm ByteDance introduced its short-video platform Douyin in 2016 and its international version, TikTok, a year later.
Geoffrey Cain, a journalist and technologist, said the mental health of Generation Z in the United States is suffering, and a great deal of that stems from an addiction to TikTok.
By comparing the content exposure of a fake 13-year-old with parental control settings across various social media platforms, his research discovered that such users had the easiest access to harmful content on TikTok.
However, his team’s tests showed that the same harmful content available to 13-year-old American TikTok users isn’t accessible by 13-year-olds who use Douyin, China’s version. Instead, Chinese users see a Ministry of Public Security warning of inappropriateness when they try to view the same videos.
“So, clearly, the Chinese government knows that this is extremely harmful content,” Mr. Cain told The Epoch Times. “Considering that they essentially control ByteDance, why do they allow TikTok to show this in America, whereas, in China, this same material is all banned?
An Algorithm ‘Like a Magician’
Ms. Lori Schott had thought TikTok was all about cute animals and dance videos. She had no idea what Ms. Annalee Schott was actually seeing on the app.“It’s like sending her into a horrible store that has no warning, and you think it’s like a candy store,” she said. “You go inside, and it’s dark and despairing. I think these kids get so down they start connecting, or those algorithms start feeding on that.”
It’s the “ability to selectively amplify and influence people’s attitudes by focusing their attention on the things that you want them to focus on, like a magician,” Mr. Harris said.
TikTok has repeatedly maintained that it is independent from its Chinese parent company. According to TikTok, its U.S. customer data are stored in Virginia and backed up in Singapore, and it has never, and will never, share its U.S. data with the Chinese regime.
At the Senate hearing, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), vice chair of the committee, asked the FBI director whether ByteDance had to comply if the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted it to “put out videos that make Americans fight with each other or spread conspiracy theories and get them at each other’s throat.”
Mr. Wray confirmed that it would be the case, adding that “that kind of influence operation, or the different kinds of influence operations you’re describing, are extraordinarily difficult to detect, which is part of what makes the national security concerns represented by TikTok so significant.”
“Data is what powers the TikTok algorithm, which is then used to manipulate our thinking,” Mr. Raskin said.
The Epoch Times has contacted TikTok for comment.
A ‘State Secret’ Algorithm
China has objected to selling TikTok since 2020, when President Donald Trump ordered ByteDance to divest the app because of national security risks. A potential acquisition from Texas-based Oracle fell apart. President Trump also issued an executive order to ban the app, but TikTok sued and got a court order blocking it on First Amendment grounds.
After President Biden took office in 2021, he replaced the ban with a Commerce Department investigation that is yet to produce a report. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have held hearings and kept pushing to address the national security concerns posed by the app.
All this suggests that the CCP treats the algorithm like a “state secret,” according to Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute, a think tank.
‘Cognitive Warfare’
Mr. Schweizer said he believes that TikTok is part of Beijing’s “cognitive warfare” to “dumb down the West.”“Our kids are getting cotton candy from ByteDance; children in China are getting spinach,” he said, referring to the two different versions of the app.
In a 2017 article published in the official newspaper for the CCP’s military, he wrote, “The target of cognitive warfare is people; the battlefield is the entire human society.”
The author advocated using “information and popular spiritual and cultural products as weapons” to “directly interfere or control the enemies’ brains,” inflict mental harm, and even cause them to take action against their own interests, such as surrender or suicide.
Mr. Schweizer said TikTok, being an emotional platform for young people, is a perfect medium for the CCP’s propaganda.
“The propaganda says, ‘Once they cross that line and think they own that feeling, then we’ve got them because now we can steer them in the direction that they want to go,’” he said.
TikTok’s Pressure Campaign
TikTok’s pressure campaign against the bill that forces Chinese divestment reveals the app’s mobilizing power.In early March, TikTok encouraged its users to lobby against the legislation. Many users were notified with a popup message upon opening the app: “Take action: Speak up against a TikTok shutdown.” Users were then able to enter their zip code to locate the phone numbers of their congressional representatives.
Key TikTok bill sponsors received “thousands” of phone calls. Children called in and threatened suicide if the bill passed, according to Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas).
“Okay, listen, if you ban TikTok, I will find you and shoot you,“ one female caller says as others giggle in the background. “That’s people’s job, and that’s my only entertainment. And people make money off there, too, you know. I’m trying to get rich like that. Anyways, I’ll shoot you and find you and cut you into pieces. Bye!”
Lawmakers have said the bill is not a ban on TikTok but a measure to protect Americans from apps with algorithms and data collection controlled by foreign adversaries. They note that TikTok can continue to operate if it cuts ties with its China-based parent company.
TikTok says otherwise. “This bill is an outright ban of TikTok, no matter how much the authors try to disguise it,” a TikTok spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email last month.
“This legislation will trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and deprive 5 million small businesses of a platform they rely on to grow and create jobs.”
Meanwhile, TikTok has also carried out an all-out public relations campaign in Washington.
According to a senior legislative aide, TikTok has sought to join congressional hearings so that its CEO can be seated next to executives from social media platforms Meta and X. This way, Americans might view TikTok as just another California-based social media company.
Just Another Social Media Platform?
Another incident reveals TikTok as more than just an entertainment and e-commerce platform for China.
Mr. Cain said TikTok has seeped into the United States’ communications infrastructure, which is usually heavily guarded in democratic countries to restrict foreign ownership.
“TikTok essentially serves the same purpose as CNN or Fox News,” he said. “Imagine the chaos that would happen if the Chinese government controlled CNN.”
He said the TikTok bill simply updates existing laws to extend the regulation of the communications infrastructure to social media. Yet, by appearing like just another U.S. social media platform, TikTok can capitalize on xenophobic, anti-Asian, or freedom of speech arguments against the bill.
But leaders of foreign adversaries shouldn’t have unrestricted First Amendment rights in the United States, Mr. Cain said.
He said he thinks it’s only a matter of time before TikTok is sold or banned.
Indeed, that appears to be the case with the Senate expected to clear the House-passed bill that gives ByteDance one year to divest its ownership of TikTok or be banned.
Meanwhile, Ms. Lori Schott is determined to tell Ms. Annalee Schott’s story to help more youth and their parents.
