What exactly about the tiktok app makes it Chinese spyware? Has it been proven it can do something?
In: 4544
That’s not the concern, not really.
There’s three concerns:
1. TikTok is known to do some relatively aggressive user data collection. Lots of other apps also do this. On its own, not great, but not uniquely bad either.
2. TikTok is known to be able to make its data available to the Chinese government. China has laws that require any Chinese national to turn over any trade secrets to the government if the government asks. This is also what’s driving most of the semiconductor industry out of China.
3. TikTok isn’t available in China, but the same developer has a very similar app which is only available in China. It’s never a great sign when a country exports a product they make illegal domestically.
Taken together, the concern is that China can use TikTok as a pretty powerful influence campaign tool. They can figure out what users it wants to target. They have access to a per-user algorithm through which to target those people. There’s little risk of the app targeting their own people because they’ve banned the app internally.
There’s two main concerns about how it might be used:
1. Targeting of Chinese expats to either turn them against Chinese interests, such as Taiwan. Witness the church shooting about 2 miles from my house where a ~~Chinese expat~~ *Taiwanese expat* attacked a Taiwanese congregation because he was angry about the lack of reunification between the two countries. China could use TikTok as a radicalization pipeline given the 3 above items.
2. Targeting of the general public for influence campaigns. We know that at least some of the conservative anti-mask/anti-vax campaign originated by Russian intelligence services, that the GOP unwittingly bought into. This shows the potential damage that social media driven influence campaigns can do, especially if it results in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Brexit may have been driven by an influence campaign. We just learned the other day that the head FBI counterterrorism agent in the NY office was involved in an influence campaign to affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.
Influence campaigns are no joke, and the US works closely with social media companies to combat them (or, at least they used to with Twitter – pretty sure that’s completely busted now). Having a social media outlet like TikTok that is not responsive to US intelligence concerns is a problem.
[Correction] I originally wrote ‘Chinese expat’ as struck out above, when the individual was a Taiwanese expat. As I was writing the comment I searched and [read this article](https://www.thedailybeast.com/laguna-woods-gunman-identified-as-david-chou-of-las-vegas) which incorrectly labeled Chou as a Chinese national. Replies corrected me and asked that I correct this post.
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