However, it remains unclear whether TikTok poses a specific and unique threat to US national security or simply a convenient proxy through which lawmakers are grappling with larger issues of data security and privacy, misinformation, content moderation, and influence in a globalized technology landscape. market. Similarly, Chinese telecom giant Huawei faces controversy over whether the US should incorporate Chinese-made hardware into domestic 5G infrastructurewhich was eventually banned.
“There are certainly signs that China’s influence efforts may be on the rise, relative to China’s strategy,” said Kian Vesteinsson, research analyst at the nonprofit Freedom House. Chinese government on digital authoritarianism. “But it is important for us to acknowledge that the US government has its own shady national security watchdogs. And in recent years, US government agencies have been monitoring the social media accounts of people coordinating protests in the US and doing things like searching electronic devices across the country. country and at the border. These kinds of tactics undermine the idea that this is just a foreign threat.”
Then there may be the energy imbalance that TikTok can create. One thing about TikTok in particular is that its popularity and popularity in the US could make it a transit point for the Chinese government to mine US users’ data and carry out malicious activities. influence in the United States. Meanwhile, the US government may feel that it lacks a comparable mechanism to directly obtain Chinese user data and work to shake up public opinion in China.
“Let’s assume for a second that US intelligence has access to WeChat. They will have to fight hard to get that access, and it will be constantly at risk of being discovered and disabled. China, on the other hand, doesn’t have to struggle to gain access to TikTok; Jake Williams, director of cyber threat intelligence at security firm Scythe and a former hacker for the National Security Agency, says they have it. “Myself, I don’t think the TikTok app on people’s devices is a significant threat, but China’s potential for data collection across the entire platform is a bigger concern, especially especially when combined with other data already collected by Chinese state institutions.”
Given its immense popularity, ownership, and the fact that much of TikTok’s activity is public in nature, there’s no clear technical solution for Chinese boxing to pull out of the service. The question is whether the US government wants to offer a business solution or encourage the development of an attractive alternative platform. However, privacy violations, security concerns, and foreign influence activities against US residents through social media are issues that the US government has yet to address. And neither tech bans nor anti-surveillance will make them go away.
“The one thing that we should really escalate here is that the US should take the lead,” said Vensteinsson of Freedom House. “When we talk about expanding US government surveillance powers, that sets a really bad example for governments around the world.”
