With TikTok, China has dangerous power over Americans. We must take it on | Opinion
From Jan. 28 to Feb. 4, 2023, a relatively unsophisticated Chinese spy balloon drifted eastward over U.S. airspace until it passed the coast of South Carolina, where an Air Force jet shot it down. Wreckage debris was sent to the FBI laboratory in Quantico, Virgina, where it was determined that the surveillance equipment onboard had not been able to transmit any data it had gathered back to China.
While some Americans were craning their necks at the sky, 170 million of us had our eyes riveted to our smartphones, where TikTok was tracking where we shopped and what we bought, all the while collecting information about our personal background — from our musical preferences to our racial prejudices to our political persuasions.
Why should that concern us?
Because it is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, TikTok is required to cooperate with Chinese national intelligence efforts. So, Americans are now asking, “What could China do with that information?“
In the words of FBI Director Christopher Wray, plenty: “The Chinese government could use [TikTok] to control data collection on millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which could be used for influence operations.”
That is exactly what the political consulting company Cambridge Analytica did in 2016, when it acquired data on 87 million Facebook users and used it to build detailed profiles of American voters. They also claimed to analyze personality traits and influence voter behavior through targeted digital campaigns.
With AI technology, China could send deepfake messages from our president, and no one would be able to distinguish between the AI-generated talking head and reality. Hypothetically, they could convince Americans that our voting system was rigged, discouraging us from voting.
Take this real-life example cited in The Atlantic in January: “On the eve of the New Hampshire primary, some of the state’s voters received a robocall purporting to be from President Joe Biden. Unlike the other such prerecorded calls reminding people to vote, this one had a different ask: Don’t bother coming out to the polls, the voice instructed. Better to ‘save your vote for the November election.’ ”
Interfering with elections could create disagreement about who won the presidency, as we experienced in 2020. Imagine not knowing who our leaders were, or worse, the country splitting over it and resorting to violence to settle it. We could find ourselves in a second American civil war. Just what China wants to see.
China could destabilize major sectors of our economy by fabricating bank failures or by influencing international relations by pushing pro-China propaganda.
If China desired, it could follow Russia’s old KGB playbook to take down America by changing our perceptions of reality so that no one is sure of anything anymore. With TikTok, China would be much more effective than Russia ever was.
Frightened yet? Doesn’t it feel like those who want to hurt us are just beginning to understand how they can use this technology against us?
Am I being an alarmist? Not in the studied opinion of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is the head of 18 intelligence agencies in the U.S. It publishes a yearly assessment of the main threats to our nation’s global interests. It sounded the alarm that China’s government may “attempt to influence the U.S. elections in 2024 at some level because of its desire to sideline critics of China and magnify U.S. societal divisions.”
In the ever-devious hands of the Chinese Communist Party, TikTok makes a spy balloon seem like child’s play.
As such, the House was right to pass bipartisan legislation to require TikTok to divest of its Chinese ownership or else be banned from U.S. “app” stores and devices. On March 8, Biden said he would sign the TikTok ban when it passes the Senate.
Let’s hope the Senate acts on it. Because sometimes, protecting our democracy outweighs free enterprise.
This story was originally published March 27, 2024 at 1:22 PM with the headline "With TikTok, China has dangerous power over Americans. We must take it on | Opinion."