The TikTok Trojan Horse and China’s Surveillance Dystopia

Social media app is a threat to US national security, says author of 'The Perfect Police State'

Geoffrey Cain, author of "The Perfect Police State." Bao Qiu/The Epoch Times

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Geoffrey Cain says. “Because TikTok, although the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow the laws of China—laws created by the Chinese Communist Party.”

In a recent episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek speaks with Cain, an award-winning journalist, technologist, and author of “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.”

Cain recently testified before the U.S. Senate about TikTok and why he believes the social media app’s troubled emergence in the United States, its shadowy corporate structure, and its connection to China’s security and data laws make it a unique national security threat.

Jan Jekielek: Recently, you were in the U.S. Senate giving testimony about social media and national security, specifically about TikTok. What did you find?

Geoffrey Cain: TikTok is a national security threat to the United States. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, because TikTok, although the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow the laws of China—laws created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

TikTok is an app that’s popular among Generation Z users. It’s the next wave of social media where anyone can create a short clip of themselves dancing to music or showing their cat. You can load up celebrities and see what they’re up to. The app seems harmless, but beneath the surface, there’s a lot going on. It was created five or six years ago by ByteDance, a Chinese company based in Beijing.

Then, there’s the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS]. It’s charged with reviewing foreign investments that might pose some kind of national security risk. CFIUS has reviewed investments in semiconductors, surveillance cameras, and military weaponry and components.

Now, TikTok is essentially a data-scooping machine. It’s getting your face, your voice, your behavior, your movements. It’s learning about you. Like all social media platforms, these systems are extremely profitable because they use that data to sell ads to consumers.

And yet, there wasn’t even a CFIUS review at the beginning. That should sound alarm bells. Why did TikTok decide not to do that review? It’s as if they sneaked into the market to place their software in the hands of the next generation.

Mr. Jekielek: Doesn’t that somehow create an opportunity to do a CFIUS review?

Mr. Cain: In 2020, the Trump administration initiated a CFIUS review. President Donald Trump wanted to get TikTok banned. TikTok challenged this review in court and challenged some of the decisions. For the past year, TikTok has been under a CFIUS review, but they’ve been very quiet about it. It’s not clear what’s going to happen. According to TikTok, some kind of agreement with the U.S. government will ensure that data sharing with China won’t be possible. That’s their claim, but I don’t totally believe it.

One of the problems is that the TikTok algorithm decides what you see, and in the past, TikTok executives have admitted the app has been used to suppress bad news coming out of China.

In 2019, a leaked moderation guideline showed ByteDance instructing TikTok moderators, including in America, to look for material that might look bad. That included anything that shows poverty, slums, poor people, and so-called ugly people. The moderation guidelines said: “You need to suppress this kind of material. We only want to see beautiful people who are happy and nice and attractive.”

This was used to suppress news about the Uyghurs and human rights abuses in China.

Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to the data gathering and what that creates. Please give me the picture.

Mr. Cain: Here’s the problem. The Chinese Communist Party under Xi Jinping has repeatedly said that it wants to become a global leader in artificial intelligence, and that AI is going to be a major pillar of Chinese military and surveillance power. Xi has made it clear he’s building a surveillance state that will know everything that’s going on within China, and potentially outside of China, too.

This is where the TikTok and the ByteDance connection becomes problematic. The Chinese Communist Party will see TikTok fundamentally as a Chinese company and one that needs to report to the government.

The National Intelligence Law of China and National Security Law require people in China to take part in intelligence operations upon request. It doesn’t matter if TikTok says, and this is how they always respond, “We’re an American company, we’re separate, we’re based all over the world, we’re not the same as the Chinese company ByteDance.” But they also admit they have employees in China and these employees, as we know, are subject to the harsh realities of the Chinese Communist Party.

And the evidence that keeps coming out contradicts what they say under oath in front of U.S. senators. There are audio files where you could hear people talking about how they had to go through Chinese executives and developers to figure out how the data of Americans was being observed and used. TikTok has come out full blast trying to deny this is the case, but the audio files are there.

One other piece of evidence is in TikTok’s own privacy policy, which says, “We can share data with our corporate group.” TikTok was pressed about this in a previous congressional hearing. The senator asked them three times, “What is the definition of your corporate group? Does this include ByteDance in China?” After dodging the question repeatedly, TikTok finally admitted, “Yes, our corporate group includes ByteDance.” That means, according to their own policies, they might share their data with the Chinese arm.

Mr. Jekielek: In “The Perfect Police State,” you had a guide tell you the three steps toward a perfect police state. Please explain those.

Mr. Cain: When I was writing the book, I found that many of the Uyghurs I was talking to, including my guide in Xinjiang, were not just awash in propaganda. They were informed about events around the world and were very sharp on what was going on around them.

My guide told me there was a three-step process toward a police state, and that he had been observing it very carefully. The first step was this process of ensuring that technology, these social media apps, were in the hands of everybody and were then used to blast misinformation at users about supposed terrorism and how the communist party must react. The Chinese government exploited a sea change in technology to feed people misinformation and to spy on them.

Mr. Jekielek: What are the other two steps?

Mr. Cain: The second step was to create artificial categories, looking for ways to separate the population, to move the Uyghur population, for example, to different areas from the majority Han Chinese population.

The third step was what my guide called the panopticon, a very old term. Imagine there’s a circular prison camp with a guard post in the center and there’s one guard in this post who can see all of the prisoners because it’s a giant circle around him. But the prisoners can’t see the guard looking at them, so they can only guess if they’re being watched at any moment. It’s a very good system for controlling the prison population, because everybody is scared of being watched, and nobody wants to get in trouble. This is the system the Chinese Communist Party set up in western China back in 2016 and 2017.

It was a digital panopticon in which everybody was constantly being watched by an artificial intelligence system, which was called the IJOP or the Integrated Joint Operations Platform. This platform would gather data from smartphones. It would gather data from cameras. This region had cameras that covered almost every square inch. They would track everybody and try to create this sense of fear that the party is watching and you have to fall in line. You never knew if you were going to be the next target.

Mr. Jekielek: A former U.S. senator told me that at one point he really believed we could change China and help it become a more democratic, a more fair and open system. Then he said, “But I actually think they changed us.” And I agree with that.

Mr. Cain: The Chinese system has changed us. Ask any major corporate CEO of any major company operating in China: “What do you think about China’s human rights record? Do you condemn the genocide of the Uyghurs? What is your stance on Tibet, on Taiwan, on Falun Gong, and on all these different groups?” They typically respond that they’re not diplomats. They’ll often say, “We’re not human rights activists, we’re just here to do business.”

What they’re admitting is that they just want the money. A lot of big corporations are turning us into something more like China with this vow of silence that we are not allowed to criticize China or raise the problem of human rights, that we must take a vow of silence in exchange for profit.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.