TikTok Time Is Running Out
by Peter Schweizer • November 14, 2022 at 5:00 am
The Biden administration rolled back its predecessor's efforts to ban TikTok and is currently in negotiations with the company through the government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). According to published reports, a draft agreement would require exclusive US storage for all TikTok data, monitoring of TikTok's powerful content recommendation algorithms, and create an oversight board comprised of cyber-security experts. The terms of the draft agreement would not require ByteDance to sell TikTok, as the Trump administration previously demanded.
The danger of this approach is obvious – that the app and all the collected data remain under the ownership of a Chinese company which, according to Chinese law, is required to provide this data to the Communist government upon request, at any time.
The draft agreement, which has not been announced or made public, has not satisfied TikTok's critics. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, a longtime critic of TikTok, renewed his call earlier this month for the US government to ban the app from Apple's and Google's app stores over the national security risks posed by its ties to China.
[T]he app circulated false information about the COVID-19 virus during the pandemic and [technology experts] believe China could potentially do so again as part of broader propaganda efforts to influence public discourse within the US.
At a time when an invasion of Taiwan by Communist China looms ever larger, why worry about TikTok?
Targeted at American teens, TikTok is a mobile app for sharing short videos, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. After five short years on the market, it has more than one billion users worldwide. The app has lived under deep suspicion for much of that time, as American cyber-security and counter-intelligence experts have warned about its enormous reach and direct connections to the Chinese Communist Party.
