"I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China," former TikTok senior data scientist Evan Turner revealed on Monday in a Fortune report. According to Turner, his efforts went far beyond what social media apps usually do, which is to upload every scrap of data they can get hold of to the parent company's servers.
"Every two weeks," the Spectator reported, "Turner emailed spreadsheets filled with data on hundreds of thousands of US users to [TikTok owner] ByteDance workers in Beijing."
"The driver’s licenses of American users were also accessible on the platform," the New York Times wrote last year, "as were some users’ potentially illegal content, such as child sexual abuse materials. In many cases, the information was available in Lark 'groups' — essentially chat rooms of employees — with thousands of members." Just to be clear, ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing and is closely knit with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Worse, if that's even possible, Turner said, "There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this."
After President Donald Trump's ultimately failed effort to ban TikTok, the company promised to establish independence from ByteDance. It would start using U.S.-based servers and stop sending all its data to Beijing. But Fortune also reported that according to Turner, "the stealth chain of command contradicted what TikTok’s executives had said about the company’s independence from ByteDance."
Believe it or not, this grown-up Cold War kid who despises Communist China every bit as much as I did the Soviet Union way back when is less concerned with the data ByteDance gives to the CCP than I am with TikTok's manipulation of kids. The thing to remember about the Western version of TikTok is that it's what I call social malware.
There's a reason Chaya Raichik's LibsOfTikTok has so much material to use. TikTok's algorithm is tweaked to highlight the weirdest, the worst, and the most divisive content — served up to young minds who assume that the weirdest, the worst, and the most divisive is normal. It's what they see, and it's what their friends see on social media.
Every social contagion requires a pathway. The version of TikTok that ByteDance peddles in the West is tailor-made to serve as the no-speed-limit autobahn of social contagion. If you want a good idea of why so many adolescent girls are suddenly "trans" and getting their healthy breasts cut off — even though gender dysphoria has, up until recent years, been an affliction almost exclusively for men — look no further than TikTok.
Then there are the political manipulations. My younger son reminded me this morning that his friends — most of whom do have TikTok — got tailored alerts a few weeks ago, urging them to contact Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) and tell him not to ban TikTok. Wait until China or North Korea starts a shooting war in the Pacific and TikTok helps galvanize the anti-American/Japanese/Taiwanese/South Korean protests.
Beijing has American youth on speed dial, and that's why TikTok either needs to be banned or divested from ByteDance.
Contrasted with TikTok, the app I've banned my kids from using, there's another piece of Chinese spyware that I don't mind using at all: Zoom. It's the best free videoconferencing app I've ever used and I don't have any vital secrets to give away, so I don't worry if Zoom phones home to Beijing.
Banning TikTok isn't a freedom of speech issue. Nobody is telling anybody that they can't upload whatever bit of weirdness or wonderfulness they care to create. But there's no First Amendment right enjoyed by the CCP to manipulate the American people.
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