Experts Warn that TikTok Bill Won’t Be Enough to Counter CCP’s Cyber Aggression

On April 24, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that could potentially ban the widely popular social media app TikTok in the U.S. unless the app’s parent company divests itself from Chinese ownership. But experts say that despite the move to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) data warfare tactics, the administration is not treating the threat with the seriousness it deserves.

Last week, Gordon Chang, a distinguished senior fellow at the Gatestone Institute, joined “Washington Watch” to discuss the growing threat that the CCP poses to U.S. national security.

“China is vacuuming up data from around the world, not just the United States,” he explained. “And it’s using it for various purposes. One of them, of course, is just economic.” American app users lead the globe in ARPU (average revenue per user), and TikTok reportedly made $16 billion in U.S. revenue in 2023.

But most concerning to Chang is how China is using apps like TikTok to wage cyber warfare against the U.S. “[China] is getting information in which to blackmail Americans,” he emphasized. “Remember, TikTok is on 170 million devices, which means that Beijing is getting information about more than half the American public on just one platform. [T]here’s more than just TikTok, but [the CCP] is using this in a way that is targeting the United States, and we just can’t permit that. This is more than just economics. This really goes to national security.”

Chang’s concerns were validated by Government Accountability Institute President and author Peter Schweizer last month, who warned that the CCP is actively using apps like TikTok to harvest sensitive personal information of U.S. citizens, while also using the short form video format to spread communist propaganda by eliciting “really intense emotions from young people that [makes them] very susceptible to propaganda and … manipulation [that they use] to their advantage.”

Despite the dangers, Chang did not express confidence in the Biden administration’s ability to counter the threat.

“[T]he Biden administration … doesn’t have its heart in it, because we need to show the same determination in protecting our data as the Chinese show in stealing it,” he underscored. “China [has] violated every pledge that they’ve made to the United States on data security. They violated U.S. laws by stealing data. [But] the president’s response has been to put his campaign for re-election on TikTok. He did that memorably during the Super Bowl this year. So it shows you a lack of seriousness on the part of the administration. While I’m glad that he did sign the TikTok bill last month … he extended the deadline for the sale of TikTok until after the November 5th election. So that shows you what Biden is thinking.”

Some have argued that the American system of free enterprise should allow foreign companies like ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok) to operate freely, since American investors partly own the company. But as the recent development of China forcing Apple to remove popular messaging apps from its app store in the country illustrates, the CCP does not extend any courtesies to American companies.

“[W]e’re a very different society than China,” Chang noted. “China is a communist state. It’s top down. No Chinese individual, no Chinese entity can disobey an order from the Communist Party. So when ByteDance … says, ‘Well, [we] would never provide data to the Communist Party,’ well, it has no choice but to do that. In our country, Big Tech platforms collect data like TikTok does, but if they want to — and they often do — they resist requests from the federal government about supplying data.”

Chang further warned that the CCP’s cyber aggression is potentially serving as a foretaste of China’s true ambitions, which are likely to eventually become open warfare, as illustrated by the communist regime’s recent threats against the U.S. following the passage of a military aid package for Taiwan.

“[T]hey’re going to send their planes across the median line in the Taiwan Strait, which is the boundary,” he observed. “They’ll send their ships close to Taiwan. But what we really need to keep our eye on is what they’re doing at Second Thomas Shoal and Scarborough Shoal in the Philippines, in the South China Sea, because they’re engaging in really belligerent activities, some of which constitute acts of war. And they’re doing that in defiance of America’s warnings that we are prepared to use force against China to discharge our obligations pursuant to our mutual defense treaty with the Philippines. That’s the great flashpoint right now. And that’s what I think China means when it says it’s going to impose costs on us.”

“[W]e have to ask a question, and that is: whenever has a militant state with expansive territorial ambitions engaged in vast military buildup and not gone to war?” Chang concluded.