Commentary
Congress seems
determined to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app that stands accused of being a
Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The vast majority of Americans, according to
recent Pew findings, also support a ban.
Some Democrats, however, believe a
ban on TikTok would be “racist.” In reality, banning TikTok has nothing to do with racism, and everything to do with national security. Currently, countries such as France, Norway, and The Netherlands
are pushing forward with plans to ban the app on government devices. In 2020, India imposed
a nationwide ban on TikTok (as well as a number of other Chinese apps), citing privacy and security concerns. More recently, Taiwan imposed
a public sector ban on the controversial app.
As the writer Klon Kitchen, a 15-year veteran of the intelligence community,
previously noted, “Imagine waking up to a news story reporting China has secretly deployed 100 million sensors around the United States and has been clandestinely collecting our personal contacts, photos, GPS locations, online purchasing and viewing habits, and even our keyboard swipes and patterns.” With TikTok, this is exactly what’s happening every single day, he warned.
Former CIA intelligence officer
Andrew Bustamante has seen the rise and expansion of not just TikTok, but multiple Chinese companies that are now coming under heavy scrutiny from the U.S. government.
“TikTok is the modern-day application of a classic strategy. The idea of a Trojan horse is common knowledge to even grade school children—a threat hides inside something that looks like a toy,” the cyberintelligence expert told me.
Contrary to popular belief, he added, “TikTok is not just another social media platform collecting data like Facebook or Instagram.”
False equivalencies are extremely dangerous. Sure, Instagram is bad, but TikTok is exponentially worse. Its algorithm, arguably the most
aggressive in existence, pushes inordinate amounts of dangerous content.
Moreover, the version of TikTok offered to Americans is very different to the one offered to Chinese citizens. Known as Douyin, this watered-down version of TikTok is full of
educational content. TikTok, on the other hand, is full of destructive content. As the tech expert Tristan Harris
previously noted, the CCP offers “a spinach version of TikTok” to their citizens, “while they ship the opium version to the rest of the world.”
For those unwilling to take the threat of TikTok seriously, Bustamante asks all Americans to “imagine what a person could do if they had the power to choose what content children, soldiers, mothers, and even clinically depressed people watch on a second-by-second basis.”
This is what TikTok, with its hyper-advanced algorithms, does. In fact, as Bustamante added, “They are so advanced they can target audiences based on geographic location, web browsing behavior, scrolling activity, left or right-hand dominance, and a thousand other unique data points.”
The amount and variety of data collected by the app is absolutely staggering. In 2021, as
TechCrunch first reported, TikTok introduced a host of new data-harvesting policies, allowing the app to vacuum up
all sorts of information, from one’s web history and keystroke patterns to their biometric face and voice prints. In February 2021, TikTok agreed to a $92 million settlement in Illinois for gathering biometric data without consent. Worryingly, unlike Illinois,
the vast majority of U.S. states have no biometric privacy laws in place, meaning millions of Americans are at risk of having their fingerprints, iris scans, facial images, and other biometry
shared with the CCP. To date, the CCP has already likely stolen the data of some
264 million Americans.
With Instagram or Facebook, said Bustamante, that data is certainly weaponized—but it’s used to bombard individuals with ads (and generate money in the process). However, with the China-based business driving the software behind TikTok, he warned, “You can be certain their intentions are much more insidious than simple quarterly revenues. Just look at how they use technology to surveil and police their own state.” If they’re willing to inflict that much misery on their own people, just imagine what the CCP is willing to do to the United States, its
number-one competitor.
Bustamante, a man who’s intimately familiar with the ins and outs of cyberwarfare, called TikTok “a tool that can deliver content to children that encourages them to reject authority,” powered by an algorithm “designed to show firearm content to people suffering depression and anxiety.”
TikTok appears to be an unprecedented app with unprecedented scope. This is why an immediate ban is both logical and necessary.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
