Don’t save TikTok, save America from TikTok

The bill, which is currently being challenged at the Supreme Court, is the culmination of years of rising concerns about the ways in which the Chinese Communist Party can use TikTok both for espionage and to influence its over 150 million, mostly young, American users through manipulation of the app’s algorithm. 

ByteDance could have taken the easy way out, selling TikTok to an American company. However, it chose not to, partly because the algorithm is too valuable to it and the CCP and partly because Beijing hopes its fat coffers, Wall Street allies, and an army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C., will prevent the ban from ever taking effect. 

So far, it hasn’t gone well. When attempts to strangle the bill in Congress failed, TikTok mounted a legal challenge. Last month, the D.C. Circuit Court ruled decisively against it. 

TikTok petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals but found no solace when it upheld the prior ruling. It then sought an emergency injunction against the ban, and that, too, failed. It is now in the midst of a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Court.

If, as expected, the Supreme Court upholds the lower court ruling, it would leave TikTok with only one possible lifeline: presidential intervention, making this an opportune time to revisit why that would be a fatal mistake.

I won’t dwell on the fact that China spent the last two decades using digital espionage to rob the United States of trillions of dollars in intellectual property theft through commercial espionage. 

I won’t review in detail the countless, jaw-dropping cyberattacks China has been complicit in, from the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel Management that affected millions of highly sensitive personnel records to the 2017 Equifax hack that lifted economic data on half of all Americans to the 2020 Moderna hack targeting COVID-19 vaccines. 

Nor will I dwell on the more recent Chinese-origin Flax Typhoon hack that infected over 100,000 U.S. home routers, cameras, and video recorders or the Volt Typhoon hack that compromised U.S. critical infrastructure, giving Chinese hackers “the ability to shut down dozens of U.S. ports, power grids, and other infrastructure targets at will.” 

I won’t belabor how Chinese hackers targeted both presidential campaigns last year, including tapping phones used by President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect J.D. Vance. Or how Chinese hackers recently compromised the U.S. Treasury Department and a “highly sensitive” office responsible for U.S. economic sanctions.

And I am certainly not going to dwell on the absurdity of us even having this conversation while China is still actively involved in the largest cyber hack in human history. Only recently did we learn that China’s Salt Typhoon hacking group is deeply embedded in nine major telecom companies operating in the U.S., able to access the phone calls and text messages of everyday Americans. For now, “U.S. officials and affected companies have not been able to fully ascertain the scope, depth, and severity of the attack — or remove the attackers from compromised systems.”

But enough about China: What about TikTok? 

Sadly, there’s not enough time to comprehensively assess TikTok’s own dismal record, and the fact that its employees based in China have regularly accessed U.S. user data. That TikTok is the only major social media app found to monitor users’ keystrokes; that hundreds of TikTok and ByteDance employees also worked for Chinese state propaganda organizations; that TikTok and ByteDance are compelled by law to share any data with the CCP at any time for any reason; or that Chinese actors have used TikTok to push political messages to influence U.S. elections.

There’s not enough space to reflect on how TikTok tracked the location and movement of U.S. reporters investigating the Chinese app, that TikTok censors bad news about China and filters pro-China news to U.S. users, that TikTok is “capable of changing the app’s behavior as it pleases without users’ knowledge,” that TikTok’s U.S.-based servers are made by Inspur, a company controlled by the Chinese military and sanctioned by the U.S. government, or that ByteDance has a CCP “party committee” embedded in its corporate structure and a Chinese government official sitting on its board.

Are we really meant to believe the CCP, which has built the greatest dystopian digital police state in the world, has no interest in manipulating American social media to its advantage? Are we meant to believe the CCP, which spends every waking hour trying to penetrate U.S. networks and collect U.S. data, has no real interest in the gold mine of U.S. citizen data flowing through Chinese servers via TikTok? 

It’s preposterous. And it fails, miserably, the basic commonsense test. It’s like putting a repeat child sex offender in charge of your children’s daycare and hoping for the best. 

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Indeed, the reason even a notoriously dilatory Congress was stirred to action on this matter is that it isn’t just another casual theft of priceless American IP or a debilitating monthly cyberattack. This time, American children are on the front line. One online monitoring group found TikTok was pushing harmful content on eating disorders and self-harm to “vulnerable teens” every 30 seconds. 

In the coming weeks, the president and the Supreme Court have a golden opportunity — not to save TikTok, but to save America from TikTok.

Jeff M. Smith is the director of the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation