Last month the House of Representatives advanced bipartisan legislation requiring Chinese company ByteDance to sell its widely used video app TikTok, or have it banned in the United States. Meanwhile, former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin announced he would assemble a group to purchase the app.
However, the Congressional legislation is running into some sharp opposition. The Washington Post reported that a coalition of “small-business owners, educators, activists and young people who use TikTok were scrambling to respond … with many arguing that it plays an increasingly crucial role in the national economy and American public life.” (READ MORE: The Beginning of the End of TikTok?)
That “increasingly crucial role” is exactly the problem.
This recreational app has grown into a national security issue. On one hand, there is the digital privacy angle. Whatever goes onto TikTok goes directly to the Chinese Communist Party. They can access all your posts and information; so if you plan a future in US government service you might want to remember who has been watching you. Your images and other data will be filed in Beijing’s biometric databases, and the CCP can copy all the user info you load in — name, email, phone number, credit cards, and whoever you are linked to. So TikTok — like most apps, frankly — is voluntary spyware.
Then there is the algorithm, which ByteDance won’t sell or even allow anyone to view. This could mean bargain pricing for a potential app buyer. But the reason why China keeps the algorithm under wraps is because this is how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) conducts political warfare against the United States. (READ MORE: Xi Jinping’s Persecution of Chinese Christians)
Communist influence operations against the U.S. are nothing new, but the information age and rise of social media platforms gave the CCP new means of pushing out its messaging. In 2021, a RAND study detailed the use of foreign social media by the Chinese military to carry out what they call “cognitive domain operations” involving “subliminal messaging, deep fakes, overt propaganda, and public sentiment analysis.”
So TikTok is just the latest and most insidious evolution of this technique. The algorithm is a product of the political warfare that the CCP is waging on this country.
Like any algorithm TikTok makes content recommendations tailored to each user, deciding what users will see based on a variety of criteria such as engagement, user interactions, video information like captions and hashtags, device and account settings like country and language, and how long you watch a given video.
But it can also push out or suppress messages and images based on other factors, including whatever the CCP wants you to see — or not see.
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is heavily influenced by the communist party. A study by the Jamestown Foundation found that “a party committee micromanages ByteDance’s operations and decision-making.” The party committee engages “in activities to reinforce party loyalty among its members, including oath-taking ceremonies where employees swear to uphold and never betray the Party’s agenda.” Committee secretary Zhang Fuping “emphasized the importance of the party committee taking a proactive and elevated role in oversight, ensuring that algorithmic decisions [emphasis added] are in accordance with Xi Jinping Thought and promote ‘socialist core values.’”
These algorithmic decisions are manifested in different ways inside and outside the PRC.
Douyin, the domestic Chinese version of TikTok, also owned by ByteDance, promotes socially useful messages about family, hard work, education, intelligence, and loyalty to the Communist Party. These are meant to enhance Chinese national strength, growth and cohesion. And just to make sure, this is all done under the watchful eye of the internal security services.
In 2018, Zhang Hong-ye, deputy director of the Cyber Security Bureau of the Ministry of Public Security, said that “the influence of short videos on society continues to increase, and the central and local party and government organs have opened official government affairs accounts on the Douyin platform to carry out positive energy propaganda in the form of videos, igniting the enthusiasm of all walks of life to transmit positive energy, and has won the general resonance and full affirmation of netizens and social public opinion.” (READ MORE: Hong Kong Affords a Glimpse of the Future for Taiwan)
In general, the Chinese internet has long been heavily censored. Beijing pioneered the technology of internet censorship, and the Great Firewall bans popular social media like Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter, all of which are American purveyors of negative energy, And most recently Douyin banned AI stating “it is prohibited to use generative artificial intelligence technology to create or publish content that violates scientific common sense, engages in fraud, and spreads rumors.”
This is all intended to promote a vision of China’s future as a growing and prospering country under the wise leadership of chairman Xi Jinping.
Meanwhile the TikTok algorithm in this country promotes the strange, the bizarre, the controversial and divisive. A Rutgers study from December 2023 showed that highly divisive topics like Black Lives Matter, abortion, and all things Trump, are heavily promoted, while matters the CCP would rather we not think about like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Hong Kong protests, Falun Gong, Tibetan independence, or the genocide of the Uyghurs, are downgraded or censored. Leaked TikTok moderation guidelines from 2019 showed this is intentional, not incidental.
A study in Taiwan found Tiktok users tend to have more pro-Chinese views. Other studies showed TikTok spreading violent and sometimes false imagery from Ukraine and the Gaza War. In response, TikTok restricted access to the tool analysts were using to conduct these studies. ByteDance and the PRC want to keep the TikTok algorithm hidden is because it is toxic and destabilizing by design.
Replacing TikTok should not be that difficult. Just ban it and let the marketplace replace it with something American owned and operated. But even a home-grown social medium may not be operated in a way that’s good for this country. Any such app could well echo the same type of destructive, divisive messaging that we see coming from communist China. Look at Google and its woke Gemini AI image generator, specifically tailored to produce the kind of output that Chairman Xi would absolutely love. Google and likeminded progressives are a wrecking crew for American culture. Simply banning TikTok won’t root out the generational harm that the march through the institutions has done to America.
Some question whether the U.S. government should be involved in banning an app. They argue that our commitment to free speech should be paramount. That is a valid concern. But there is no reason why the American commitment to free speech and free enterprise should allow a foreign entity operating under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party, or for that matter any other malign foreign actors, to freely exercise their mission to destroy our country.
Our adversaries are long term planners executing a strategy to weaken and destroy our freedoms and our nation. They will use every tool at their disposal to achieve these ends. They firmly believe that they are on the right side of history, that time is on their side, and the clock is ticking. You might wonder if that is why they called it TikTok.
James S. Robbins is Dean of Academics at the Institute of World Politics in Washington, D.C.
