TikTok Should It Stay Or Should It Go?

Why the incoming administration should maintain the ban and why it might not.

TikTok Should It Stay Or Should It Go?

The mass media is investing an inordinate amount of air time and print, hashing over the matter of what will be the ultimate destiny of TikTok, the social media app that is both the virtual mindspace (or lack thereof) of Gen Z (alternately dubbed the “TikTok generation”) and the data collection platform of the Chinese foreign intelligence apparatus, the Ministry Of State Security (MSS).

The New York Times, referring to the app, described it thusly,“For Gen Z, TikTok is the new search engine” while Business Insider stated that “nearly half of Gen Z is using Instagram and TikTok for search instead of Google”

Google’s Senior VP, Prabhakar Raghavan, at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference told the audience that, “in our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search … They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

James Andrew Lewis, writing in the journal of the Center For Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), notes that:

China does collect personal data on Americans and have been doing so for at least a decade, but there is no evidence that it has found a way to benefit from this. China takes advantage of the loophole created by the congressional failure to pass privacy legislation.

The new Executive Order (EO) on data may make this more difficult but will not stop foreign access to American data as the EO strictures can be circumvented. Possible explanations for China’s data collection effort include to guide influence operations, but as noted above, these are ineffectual. It could be used for espionage purposes, to identify targets for recruitment, but again, there is no evidence that China has done this.

Finally, this data could be useful for counterintelligence purposes to identify U.S. agents by correlating it with other data. It is likely that China (like other major intelligence agencies) runs analytical programs to identify persons of interest, but TikTok users may not be the best subject population for finding intelligence agents.

His assessment seems generally accurate, although I would dispute a couple of his contentions, or at least call them into question. Where he states that “there is no evidence that it has found a way to benefit from this”, that is far from conclusive. Additionally, his assumption that China’s probable employment of the data harvested from the app to guide influence operations is “ineffectual”, would be hotly contested by what we have learned in the wake of the recent national election last November.

In fact Chairman John Moolenaar (R-MI) on the House Select Committee on the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)

released the statement below following reports that a Chinese social media influence operation posing as American voters circulated divisive messaging prior to the presidential election in November.

“The Chinese Communist Party has previously used TikTok to censor the news Americans read and attempted to manipulate Taiwan’s presidential elections earlier this year. It’s no surprise the CCP is now using fraudulent social media accounts to target our upcoming elections. We encourage social media companies to expose the CCP’s propaganda campaign and take action against CCP bots that are trying to deceive Americans.”

What all our own intelligence agencies have learned, may be knowledge that is being reserved for internal analysis and for informing top officials and the office of the President, but not being distributed for public consumption - in order, as is often the case, to safeguard sources and methods. The same is true with regard to his supposition that “it could be used for espionage purposes … but again, there is no evidence that China has done this.”

It is not wise, from my perspective, to assume that China is operating a massive data collection program, with no adversarial purpose or that the activity is more likely fruitless than not. And Lewis is not quite accurate that China hasn’t utilized the TikTok platform for intelligence gathering.

A former employee of ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, Yintao Yu, in a court filing in 2023, disclosed with specific examples, how the Chinese Communist Party spied on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong in 2018 using “backdoor” access to TikTok to identify and monitor the activists’ locations and communications as well as accessed the data of TikTok users on a broader scale for the purpose of distributing propaganda.

Yu testified under oath that:

“The Committee and external investigators used the god credential to identify and locate the Hong Kong protestors, civil rights activists, and supporters of the protests. From the logs, I saw that the Committee accessed the protestors’, civil rights activists’, and supporters’ unique user data, locations, and communications.”

To sum up the inherent risk, Rob Joyce, National Security Agency’s Director of Cybersecurity, in response to reporters questions regarding security issues with the app, told them that “People are always looking for the smoking gun in these technologies. I characterize it much more as a loaded gun.”

He’s right. Once a gun is “smoking”, the crime has been committed and someone is a statistic. The someone could be 340 million Americans, to one degree or another.

The manipulative potential of a platform like TikTok is not limited to Chinese intelligence operations. If China believes that ultimately, a particular American leader such as the president, is actually serving their ultimate interests by among other things, dividing Americans, they would certainly not hesitate to amplify the effect using this app.

The incoming president, Donald Trump and his administration are prime subjects for being used as useful idiots and devil dolls, internally destroying what remains of the cohesiveness of U.S. society and replacing it with enmity and in doing so, weakening us, not to mention re-fashioning America as an authoritarian nation more synergistic with China, Russia, North Korea and the rest, to whom democracy is an abstraction at best.

And legislation in place in China already codifies the central government’s agenda and intention to gather data that supports its efforts to subvert and surveil any and all nations it sees value in disrupting, degrading and conducting counterintelligence operations against.

China surveils its own people. Of course they are surveilling us.

Chinese law, specifically its National Intelligence Law, requires that all private Chinese companies and persons turn over any data they collect to the government upon demand.

As the law states, “All organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.”

“National intelligence efforts” could be anything that, as the bill makes clear, involves information relevant to the “interests of the People’s Republic of China.”

To assume that the concern over the national security implications of Beijing’s control of Tik Tok is merely hype, political opportunism or some form of baseless hysteria, is a posture fraught with existential risk. At what potential cost, might we dismiss the threat? What about “better safe than sorry?”

The other deleterious aspect of Tik Tok is that it is negatively impacting our young people, those Gen Z’rs, by promoting, providing a platform for and amplifying a number of elements that are degrading society – such as Celebrity culture (yes, I know that is an oxymoron), abusive interactions between youth that harm their mental well being and have in too many cases, led to self harm, up to and including suicide and propagating false narratives and misinformation / disinformation.

Unfortunately, such defects are not grounds legally, to ban Tik Tok or anything else similar to it. And yes, if the ban of the Tik Tok app is finalized, the decision to be made most likely by Trump - or alternately, the codes and the algorithms are sold to an entity not controlled by China – a nearly identical model will be adopted and launched to replace it with, without any subtractions of the negative components and resulting atmosphere.

The ideal solution to Tik Tok, Instagram and other such mediums of youth obsession with social media outlets, would be for parents to be situationally aware of and regulate the activities of their children on these apps, but anyone with a working knowledge of the state or parenting in the United States at the present, knows this is far from likely.

In addition, the prime age demographic using Tik Tok, includes post teen consumers – adults who make their own decisions and choices as to what they prefer to engage online.

One problem that attaches itself to the widespread use of social media and the universe of both useless, counterproductive and sinister elements present on it, is that it has been established by neuroscience that with teens and young adults, the pre-frontal cortex, which is the locus of analytic processes, critical thinking and decision making – is still quite undeveloped in those age groups and still has a lot of potential for maturation and development.

We’re allowing our children to consume a lot of stimuli that they do not have the facility to defend themselves against or discern. But again, that is something that banning TikTok is not going to solve and does not provide a legal argument for its removal.

Free Speech? Seriously?

Finally, with regard to the most widespread and simplistic argument against shutting down TikTok, or insisting it be divested, I am not one of those who are of the persuasion that the banning of TikTok, just affirmed by the Supreme Court’s last minute ruling, is an infringement of free speech, neither have I found any of the counter arguments involving this objection, remotely convincing.

Free Speech is protected in the Constitution, but not using mediums that have the effect or the potential to cause material and profound harm or that function as an adjunct of a foreign adversary’s surveillance toolkit. That’s something else other than free speech altogether. Of course - and this is another can of worms we could open here, but won’t - we have domestic run social media platforms and their proponents on the Right and the GOP, that define everything as free speech, including disinformation and messaging that tends to inflame, incite and inspire violence.

To even invoke the equation of free speech in this issue, as some of our mass media has been seduced into parroting, is patently absurd.

No such privilege exists in China and social media there, is constantly monitored, and what public mediums exist are strictly censored and are dictated with regard to what subjects they are permitted to discuss and which are prohibited at penalty of imprisonment.

Rational minds understand the transparent intentions of the Peoples’ Republic Of China and its predatory instincts and know that we have waited much too long to rein in TikTok. But it has to be done. And I would not bank on president-elect Trump actually slamming the door shut on it.

He no doubt has been advised as to how the app actually energized his messaging among trend driven Gen Z’s, especially confused, alienated and manipulated young men abused with the notion that Trump is some sort of macho persona, when the reality could not be more to the contrary.