Kara Frederick from the Heritage Foundation joins Allie and Sarah to discuss TikTok and why it poses a threat to our privacy and national security. She also explains why TikTok should be banned in the first place.
00:01:00.380I might talk about some more of it tomorrow.
00:01:02.880I still want to get to the whole thing about Florida allegedly banning books like the fascists of the 20th century and to debunk a lot of the narratives that you've heard about that.
00:01:16.280But after the Nashville tragedy happened, obviously, that overtook yesterday's episode.
00:01:21.340And now I really wanted to get into what's happening in Congress with TikTok.
00:05:00.140So it would effectively be prohibiting TikTok from operating within the U.S. market.
00:05:05.180What that would look like, there's degrees of gradation in terms of, you know, it's not going to wipe TikTok off your phone tomorrow.
00:05:11.520But there would be a process in not effectively allowing Americans to access this app on their mobile operating systems and on their desktops.
00:05:21.560So their digital platforms in general.
00:05:24.120OK, and why are we even talking about this?
00:05:26.600Because we remember Trump bringing this up a couple of years ago.
00:05:36.200It's a little weird that the Biden administration would want to do something that Trump also wanted to do.
00:05:40.280Yeah, which is, I think, a testament to the gravity of the situation and the depth of the links to the Chinese Communist Party that this digital platform TikTok has.
00:05:52.520And I think the best way to explain it is TikTok is owned by a parent company called ByteDance.
00:05:58.820That company is headquartered in Beijing and it is subject to the People's Republic of China's laws and policies.
00:06:05.960And foremost among this is a 2017 national intelligence law, which effectively compels, quote unquote, private companies headquartered in China to do government work.
00:06:16.880So if the state has a need, the state meaning the Chinese Communist Party, has a need for, say, the data that TikTok collects or the data that ByteDance collects through TikTok, then ByteDance is effectively compelled to fork over that data.
00:06:35.520So every private entity in China has to abide by these laws and policies and they all have to work together to achieve the ends of the PRC or the Chinese Communist Party.
00:06:46.880OK, gotcha. And is there evidence that this that this is happening?
00:06:53.260Is there evidence that there is CCP interference within TikTok in a way that could damage the privacy of Americans and the security of the United States?
00:07:03.080Oh, there are there are there are reams of evidence that point in this direction.
00:07:07.720I would say specifically in concrete ways, ByteDance has a domestic subsidiary, which has three board seats.
00:07:15.400One of those board seats is a card carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party.
00:07:20.200We the other researchers have figured out through LinkedIn that over 300 LinkedIn profiles of four ByteDance and TikTok employees say that they either currently or used to work for Chinese state media.
00:07:35.020And we know from leaked messaging docs, the PR strategy as recently updated as 2021 for TikTok was to downplay ByteDance, downplay the China connection and and not focus on the fact that they are intertwined.
00:07:51.500And we also know there's an internal CCP apparatus within ByteDance, too, that has influence over the direction the platforms take.
00:08:00.040And then, again, in terms of accessing data, TikTok has maintained and equivocated and misrepresented for years that none of that U.S. data is not easily accessed by Chinese engineers or by employees in China.
00:08:13.460We know for a fact, given 80 leaked audio files for meetings, these are 80 meetings, that that's not true, that Chinese engineers have repeatedly accessed U.S. user data.
00:08:25.580And more and more information keeps coming out where Senator Hawley has a whistleblower with intimate knowledge of TikTok's operations that basically says anyone in employees in China can switch between U.S. data and Chinese data like a light switch.
00:08:40.540So over and over and over and over again, TikTok's defense is, oh, this is all hypothetical, but everything they say is not happening is actually happening.
00:08:48.340And afterwards, when they're called on it, it's mea culpa, mea culpa.
00:08:50.980But yeah, we've got a confluence of evidence that that pretty much says, yeah, the Chinese links are very, very deep here and we'll try our best to downplay them.
00:09:00.400So I know this might sound like a crazy question, but I've I've heard this.
00:09:04.400I've heard this from friends. Why should we care?
00:09:08.980Now, I care. I've never downloaded TikTok. I've never had TikTok on my phone.
00:09:13.180I've never opened a TikTok video. This is even before CCP.
00:09:17.460I just didn't need anything else on my phone to distract me.
00:09:21.160But then, of course, this is an added reason.
00:09:23.300But some of my friends are like, why do I care if the CCP accesses my data?
00:09:28.840I already give all of my data to Apple, to Twitter, to Facebook, to all these places.
00:09:35.400You know, they would say, I live a boring life.
00:09:37.640I don't really care if they know where I live or what I'm doing or that I like these cooking videos or whatever.
00:10:26.120And yes, while there is a massive problem when it comes to privacy and data exploitation among these American companies, I do think we need a national data protection framework to contend with that.
00:10:36.320It is much worse when the Chinese Communist Party can do it, because right now they still have a much different system than we do.
00:10:44.160Again, I will admit that we are under pressure when it comes to an independent judiciary, a free press and an engaged citizenry.
00:10:52.740We're definitely that that's a bulwark right now.
00:10:55.720It's, you know, slightly crumbling, I would say.
00:10:58.480But we still have that standing against what the Chinese system has.
00:11:16.380So two things that have to do with China.
00:11:18.160And then third, there's the data exploitation and collection issue.
00:11:21.880That is I think it's much it's different when it comes to the the tick tock and other other private companies, because there have been studies that have been done by, you know, parties like a cybersecurity firm in Australia, which basically gave tick tock a score when they had their malware analysis tool review some of the data exploitation and collections practices.
00:11:46.840It gave them one of the worst scores in industry.
00:11:49.580It said tick tock effectively exists as a data collection platform.
00:11:55.540The only other app that got even close to what tick tock is doing with your data and how it's collecting your data and how vulnerable your data is, given their systems is a Russian app called VK.
00:12:51.280And this is the Wall Street Journal reporting it.
00:12:52.860So over a 15-month period, they were collecting those unique device identifiers.
00:12:58.940And then when they were, you know, people started to make noise about it, they tried to cover it up.
00:13:03.600And then another, I don't know, Australia, because they're so proximate to the China threat, they keep doing a lot of this research.
00:13:09.660They also found that every time you open TikTok, it would copy any content from your clipboard.
00:13:16.260So we store our passwords on our clipboard.
00:13:18.240We store banking information on our clipboard.
00:13:20.180TikTok was accessing it every time you open the device.
00:13:23.720That is very concerning and not common practice among industry standards.
00:13:39.960I think the point is, is that we don't exactly know what Beijing would do with all of this information, with all of this data.
00:13:48.320What we do know is that the intentions are not pure, of course.
00:13:52.120And they simply don't have the same views that we do on rights, on human rights, obviously on privacy.
00:13:59.980But when it comes to the First Amendment, when it comes to human dignity, when it comes to the protection of human beings,
00:14:06.220I mean, they just don't believe the same things that we do.
00:14:10.020And if they do continue to rise to prominence as the world's global superpower and they already have access to and are then in charge of all of our data, all of our information, all of the most private parts of our lives, which a lot of us, you know, put on our phones, then we just don't know.
00:14:31.120We don't exactly know what the threat is, but literally everything that you hold dear, whether it's your assets, your money, you know, photos of your children, passwords, credit card numbers.
00:14:43.400If they have access to all of those things, like there really is no limitation to not just the power they will have over your life, but their ability to exploit that information.
00:14:55.460And I can't say I know exactly what the tangible ramifications of that will be, but I know enough to say it's not good.
00:15:04.340Yeah, you're exactly right. And I used to be an intelligence officer. So my job was to map the networks of our enemies, of our adversaries.
00:15:13.720We effectively looked for needles and haystacks. If you are already giving them the information, they're not even going to have to look too hard to, number one, find you and number two, exploit you.
00:15:23.820And, you know, we're both mothers. I have a daughter now. China is always playing the long game.
00:15:29.260So if they have that dossier on our children, who knows how subject to blackmail they can be going forward?
00:15:36.980I like to say that we're minting an Eric Swalwell with every person who uses TikTok over and over again.
00:15:43.040You're effectively in the clutches of the CCP if you use this app.
00:15:47.540And we also know that they've created dossiers on prominent American individuals, on prominent Australians like Natalie Imbruglia.
00:15:55.260Remember the singer from the 90s? You probably don't. You're probably too young.
00:15:58.080But they have these profiles of prominent individuals so they could, in their estimation, either spy on them or pull their strings if necessary.
00:16:07.840So we know that they create these, again, these digital profiles.
00:16:12.120And they've stolen so many data sets from American individuals in general, like with the Office of Personnel Management hack,
00:16:20.080when they stole, you know, social security numbers from government employees, there was a Marriott hack linked to the Chinese state,
00:16:26.060an Anthem Healthcare hack linked to the Chinese state, an Equifax financial hack linked to the Chinese state.
00:16:33.220If they can integrate all of these data sets, use TikTok data to fill in the gaps, they've got us.
00:16:38.660360-degree profiles, you name it, and we're in their pocket.
00:16:42.900So it really, really matters what they can do in the future, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence,
00:16:48.560which can aid them in this quest by parsing through large amounts of data to pull out patterns and identify anomalies.
00:16:55.000And frankly, look for people that they can be effective of targets of espionage and blackmail.
00:18:21.780But they know all of these things about you, about your life, about your kids,
00:18:26.240probably where your kids go to school, what time you pick them up.
00:18:29.560I mean, and we are talking about the most powerful adversarial regime in the world.
00:18:35.340We, as I said, just don't know how that is going to affect us personally and individually,
00:18:41.580and then how that will affect us on a national scale.
00:18:44.720And another question I want to ask you is, because what's interesting about the CCP,
00:18:49.320and this is something they do a lot in different ways.
00:18:51.220We actually talked about this a couple weeks ago.
00:18:53.380There was this study that came out that said, oh, the conclusion stated,
00:18:59.080oh, kids with two moms or two dads actually fare better in a lot of ways than kids of a mom and a dad.
00:19:05.620And I looked into that and I was like, that's odd.
00:19:07.880And it actually, the data didn't even support the state of conclusion, but it was funded by an organization that takes its funding from the CCP.
00:19:17.560And what's interesting about that is that the CCP is very anti-LGBTQ.
00:19:22.480And we went through all of the different policies that they have restricting that kind of behavior and representation on social media.
00:19:28.380And so, and yet they kind of push that propaganda here, again, for whatever nefarious reasons.
00:19:35.020And it seems to me, and you can tell me this is my question, it took me a long time to get to it,
00:19:40.060but do you think it's possible that the CCP would be manipulating algorithms in order to push the kinds of values and ideologies
00:19:48.960that it knows will make America weaker, make America less patriotic, make America, you know, less strong, whatever, whatever it is in a variety of ways,
00:19:59.140even while it restricts that kind of stuff in its own country,
00:20:01.960because they actually are very, very restrictive when it comes to children under the age of 18, even accessing TikTok.
00:20:10.340They can only access it, I believe, during certain times of the day.
00:20:13.760There are only certain kinds of videos that kids are allowed to watch.
00:20:17.940There is no LGBTQ content that is even allowed to be represented on social media in China.
00:20:24.120And yet that's like all kids in the United States are seeing.
00:20:28.780They're getting sucked into these rabbit holes of gender ideology, very often of sexual grooming that is not tolerated by the CCP.
00:20:36.160And I'm just wondering if the CCP has a hand in pushing the kind of algorithms and content
00:20:43.940that is destroying youth in the United States, even as they restrict it for their own people.
00:20:50.120Oh, it is 100 percent possible. And I think that you would be naive to think that it's not happening.
00:20:57.860And we know this because ByteDance pushed divisive content during the 2022 midterm elections.
00:21:05.840They were mostly targeting or saying that, you know, we were supporting Democrats.
00:21:11.620They were mostly saying Republicans were bad.
00:21:14.840They were, you know, fueling incendiary debates when it comes to things like abortion.
00:21:20.100We also know that ByteDance pushed pro-CCP narratives to a U.S. user base.
00:21:26.900There was a they had a U.S. now defunct news app called Top Buzz that or yeah, Top Buzz that basically served a U.S. audience.
00:21:36.880And they put pro-China narratives on the top, basically.
00:21:40.840So we know that they're they're absolutely capable of doing this.
00:21:44.540Again, ByteDance is in the clutches of the CCP.
00:21:48.000You have that one board member and their domestic subsidiary.
00:21:51.760You have all of those Chinese state media employees that are working there.
00:21:55.700So, again, super naive to think that they're not pushing this on the American people whatsoever.
00:22:02.040And I think that's the biggest problem, the propaganda, the influence campaigns.
00:22:06.960You have a lot of, frankly, enterprising journalists who have registered on TikTok as an experiment as 13 year olds, as 14 year olds.
00:22:14.760And they find themselves absolutely inundated within minutes with eating disorder content, self-harm content, suicidal content, all of the above.
00:22:23.920And this has happened again and again and again as these journalists are doing their own experiments, because, like you said, a lot of, you know, certain outlets are paid for by the by ByteDance, by the CCP, by TikTok.
00:22:35.940And they're not going to do these studies.
00:22:37.920So people are taking matters into their own hands and actually conducting them and finding that there is a veritable onslaught of what you said of gender dysphoria content and all sorts of material that's deleterious to the health of our next generation, the mental health of our next generation, the actual health of our mental or our next generation.
00:22:56.620Like with the TikTok tics that pediatric hospitals are filled with now, massive problem.
00:23:02.980You're naive if you don't think the CCP is, if not has a direct hand in this, then laughing about ByteDance doing it and TikTok as well.
00:23:10.580And in case people don't know, TikTok tics, I don't know if we've actually talked about that, but it's basically young people who believe that they've developed, they like have Tourette's or they have some kind of issue that they can't stop doing.
00:23:27.300And it's actually not something that has developed organically in their mind or that they were born with.
00:23:33.140It's something that they have developed from watching it on TikTok.
00:24:05.540Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, introduced a bill called the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology.
00:24:24.220They wanted to get to the word restrict.
00:24:25.500So the Restrict Act, the bill requires federal actions to identify and mitigate foreign threats to information and communications, technology, products and services.
00:24:40.900Last week, March 20th through 24th, the House Committee on U.S. Competition with China heard from TikTok CEO Shuzi Chu and other TikTok officials and advocates just asking about some of the things that we were just talking about.
00:24:55.680OK, tell us a little bit about this bill.
00:25:08.700I don't think I think it's much too overreaching.
00:25:11.740I think it's much too vague, much too broad.
00:25:13.760I think it gives and I know it gives authority to the Commerce Department.
00:25:17.960And you already have the head of the Commerce Department coming out and saying that if we ban TikTok, then we're going to lose every voter under 35 in the years to come.
00:25:27.580That's a massive problem when the person charged with effectively banning TikTok, which this bill doesn't even mention TikTok to let you know that that's a big problem when she's thinking of it from a political angle.
00:25:39.060And of course, she's a Biden administration employee.
00:25:42.640So she you know, we do know that Biden likes to have a lot of his voters on TikTok and they have a natural allergy, frankly, to what Trump tried to do, especially with his executive order to ban TikTok.
00:25:54.900So I think there are a lot of problems with that.
00:25:56.560I think there are really interesting proposals that do this one thing.
00:26:00.560And I'll get a little policy wonkish here if you're if you'll let me when it comes to the specific authorities that Trump attempted to use to try to ban TikTok.
00:26:11.700And this was the emergency or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which basically gives the president broad authorities to to sanction, to look very and scrutinize and look very seriously at international transactions.
00:26:26.380And he attempted to apply these authorities, so sanctioning authorities effectively to TikTok and WeChat, another Chinese owned platform.
00:26:36.060And in what happened was TikTok sued and Biden came into office and took away his executive order to begin with.
00:26:44.400But when TikTok sued, they appealed to a specific amendment in what we call IEPA, that International Economic, International Emergency Economic Powers Act again.
00:26:54.080And it's called collectively known as the Berman Amendment, which has a carve out for informational materials.
00:27:01.080So when IEPA was updated, what Congress basically tried to do, this is in the 80s and 90s, it was updated twice.
00:27:09.260They tried to say, OK, if there's a ostensibly hostile nation like Cuba and they want to send films and photographs to America, that shouldn't be sanctioned.
00:27:18.300So there should be an informational material loophole to these authorities.
00:27:21.980So TikTok relied on that. And a federal judge agreed with them when it came to stunting the implementation of Trump's EO.
00:27:30.260So no TikTok ban because of this loophole. Now, some of these bills, they ask to amend this loophole and get rid of it.
00:27:37.800So allow those IEPA authorities to be used.
00:27:41.440I'm more in favor of those bills because it gets at a specific part of the problem.
00:27:46.040And those bills name TikTok specifically for a ban.
00:27:49.580They're not trying to slow walk something. They're not trying to weasel out of it.
00:27:52.840So I think, you know, what Senator Rubio is trying to do, what Representative McCaul is trying to do, what Representative Gallagher.
00:27:59.720And this is bipartisan, too. For some of them, downcrack Krishnamoorthy wants to work with Republican Representative Gallagher on this as well.
00:28:08.920So there are better I think there are better alternatives out there that are going to get us to the place that we want to get,
00:28:14.820which is prohibiting TikTok from operating in the U.S. market.
00:28:17.620And we should, I think, lean more into those.
00:28:32.440There are some conservative and Democrat opponents to it.
00:28:35.760Now, there are more Democrats, I think, that are against banning in general, like AOC, for example.
00:28:42.520She actually created a TikTok account and posted her first TikTok video, which I think it's crazy that Congress people are even allowed to have a TikTok.
00:28:53.060I mean, based on everything that you just said, I feel like that should just be an easy one.
00:28:57.720That if you are a public official, especially on the federal level, you should not be.
00:29:02.480We already know that TikTok is not allowed on federal devices, right?
00:29:06.000And so it's crazy that she just doesn't care about that at all.
00:30:26.740But the data vulnerability and exploitation issues that she just broke wide open for her colleagues.
00:30:32.540Because if you connect to Wi-Fi, it does open up by being on the same network.
00:30:38.180If you have TikTok downloaded on your phone and it connects to that Wi-Fi, you've potentially opened up other devices connected to the Wi-Fi to exploitation by TikTok and, frankly, by Tamsyn and thus the CCP.
00:31:04.760And thirdly, I will concede that they're a national data protection framework.
00:31:09.560We've advocated for it at the Heritage Foundation since February 2022.
00:31:13.360I do think there are privacy considerations that are going to help, but they're not going to solve the TikTok problem whatsoever.
00:31:21.040So we need it layered on top of a TikTok ban, and that'll be useful.
00:31:25.920Because there is one data point that I think your audience should know is that U.S. user data can be sold to TikTok.
00:31:32.760So even if there's a TikTok ban, TikTok and ByteDance, the CCP, can get the information from third parties, from other companies as well, just based off of the fact that, you know, there are trackers, there are software development kits that takes your data and sends it to other companies and whatnot.
00:31:49.360So to confront, I think, that data collection and sharing, that's massive.
00:31:55.660And we should do it for the United States.
00:31:57.180I think everyone who is on these platforms deserves to understand clearly how their information is collected, stored, and shared.
00:32:07.860But when it comes to TikTok, you know, just that data privacy framework, that's not going to do anything for the TikTok problem in general.
00:32:39.960And I think that really the reason is, is because they understand that they have been buoyed by the support of a lot of young people who consider themselves socialists.
00:32:49.220And a lot of their young people, I mean, a lot of their young people, one, are on TikTok.
00:32:54.080But I think they might understand, and I don't want to give them too much credit, but much of the progressive ideology that allows them to have the power that they do is being pushed on TikTok.
00:33:06.380It really helps them support their narratives, support their ideology.
00:33:10.560I think also young people that are distracted, whose minds are basically atrophying from overuse of social media, tend to vote.
00:33:20.660I'm sorry, but tend to vote for people like AOC because they don't really think through things.
00:33:25.900They don't really think through why is socialism bad.
00:33:27.980So I understand why she would, just for her own personal gain, want to keep TikTok around.
00:33:54.760Instead, this bill would give enormous and terrifying new powers to the federal government to punish American citizens and regulate how they communicate with one another.
00:34:02.300For example, the bill would regulate certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries.
00:34:07.120Now, what's a foreign adversary and who gets to decide?
00:34:10.100Well, the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, not the Congress, get to decide what foreign adversaries are.
00:34:18.240Well, that ought to trip a switch in your brain.
00:34:20.320And then the transactions with foreign adversaries would include any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in or use of any information and communications technology, product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs or the provision of data hosting services.
00:34:38.040Well, that's pretty broad. So he thinks, like, ironically, that this bill is big brother.
00:34:44.260Yeah. So, again, we've talked about it and we've put out public material where we do think this bill is very broad and very vague.
00:34:53.100And I'm myself, you know, having worked in national security my entire career, you know, I looked at I was a counterterrorism analyst.
00:35:01.240I looked at foreign Islamic terrorism, and I'm very concerned about the definition inflation of, you know, frankly, domestic extremists, terrorism, extremism, national security.
00:35:14.340So we don't want to give the government any more power, especially this Biden administration, which we've seen when it comes to school board meetings and, you know, the FBI tagging parents who objected to CRT being taught in their classrooms as potential domestic terrorists.
00:35:30.680You have a February bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security that said spreading misinformation, malinformation or disinformation about COVID was tantamount to terrorist activity.
00:35:43.280So I'm very, very concerned about using the national security apparatus, which has, you know, definitions and words that are used very deliberately because they are able to designate specific authorities to those words, hence the invocation of terrorism when it comes to these things.
00:35:59.820That comes that resources come with that. And again, authorities come with that. So I'm very concerned about that.
00:36:05.640I think the American people are right to be concerned about that as well.
00:36:08.640Yeah. So as you said earlier, there are better options.
00:36:11.480You believe that TikTok should be banned. It should be restricted, but not in a way that gives the U.S. government, who, quite frankly, we also don't trust, not in the same way that we don't trust the CCP, but we don't want any government entities spying on us and regulating us and our interactions and our commerce in that way.
00:36:31.300And so this bill is not. And so this bill is not it. And yet there are Republicans signing on to it.
00:36:42.020You know, I think it does have that groundswell of bipartisan support. Joe Biden has, you know, thrown his weight behind it.
00:36:51.740But what I also think is interesting, as we point out in our heritage publications through certain media outlets, that TikTok is pretty happy about this bill, too.
00:37:00.740So I think that's worrisome to begin with. When if it's supposed to be a TikTok ban and TikTok likes it, I would be scratching my head.
00:37:08.820You know, I don't know. Given Shochu's, the TikTok CEO's testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, you know, I don't think he did a great job.
00:37:20.880So I do think that there's still momentum when it comes to a potential TikTok ban.
00:37:25.400You know, I think there's going to be another TikTok. So whatever bill goes forward, you have to think about sort of the next TikTok, the next Chinese entity that is emerging in the U.S. marketplace.
00:37:39.280So frankly, you know, again, I'm an analyst, but I can't necessarily give predictions in terms of.
00:37:44.740But I do think there's a growing momentum for a TikTok ban. And I think a TikTok ban is a good thing.
00:37:49.460Yeah. No, I agree with you. I think it's going to face a TikTok ban.
00:37:54.120Obviously, it's going to face a lot of opposition. There are people who make a lot of money from TikTok, you know, influencers, people who don't have any malintent or people who get recipes from it and, you know, things like that.
00:38:08.260People have just kind of come to enjoy it as an app. And that's part of why it's so effective.
00:38:12.220Like we wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't have algorithms that are addicting and that make people want to continue to log on to it.
00:38:20.140We wouldn't be talking about it if it wasn't so popular. So that means it's going to be tough, I think, for some of these representatives, for some of these people in Congress to get behind any bill, no matter how common sense it is that bans TikTok, because a lot of the young constituents will be mad.
00:38:35.780Now, I, it's easy for me to say, because I don't have to be elected. I'm like, I don't care. They don't know what's good for them. Of course, they're addicted to it. It doesn't matter. It compromises our national security and also your personal privacy.
00:38:47.580Like, I'm sorry, 15 year old, your brain is not even developed. We're going to make this decision for you.
00:38:54.400So, I mean, that's, that's where I stand. But of course, like you said, I also worry about a bill like this that the government would just use to give themselves more power to exploit our data.
00:39:03.300So I meant to play this earlier. You mentioned the CEO of TikTok. And just to give the people an example of why you said he didn't do a good job and why he actually made us in Congress more frightened about what TikTok is doing.
00:39:19.960Here's an interaction between Representative Pfluger, who is from the state of Texas, and he is asking, and I'm going to ask you a little bit about what he actually means by this.
00:39:28.440He's asking about data manipulation. And here's what the CEO of TikTok had to say about that.
00:39:34.200Do you disagree with FBI Director Wray and NSA Director Nekasone when they said that the CCP could have the capability to manipulate data and send it to the United States?
00:39:52.480Okay, so it is possible that the CCP, under the auspices of ByteDance, which is your parent company, which you get paid from, has the ability to manipulate content that is being shared with 130 million Americans, yes?
00:40:07.640Okay, so he just goes on basically saying the same thing that he tried to use as an answer at the beginning of that clip.
00:40:18.740Yeah, so this is really interesting. And Director Wray came out a few years ago, he was giving an address to a college, and he basically said that ByteDance, so the Chinese Communist Party controls ByteDance, and ByteDance has the ability to control the recommendation algorithm.
00:40:37.780And I think, you know, that is something, we're not privy to, without our TSSCI clearances yet, but when you have Director Wray definitively coming out and saying that ByteDance, and thus the Chinese Communist Party, has the ability to control the recommendation algorithm, that's a problem.
00:40:54.880And I think the most telling corroboration of that is, in 2020, when Trump was issuing that initial executive order to potentially ban TikTok, what China, Chinese representatives through ByteDance, what they came out and said was that China will never sell the source code for TikTok.
00:41:13.220So China, and we know that Chinese government officials have instituted export controls that cover AI and algorithms.
00:41:21.180So if China doesn't want to get rid of the algorithm behind TikTok, why?
00:41:26.460Do they just want it because it's powerful and it's good, and they just want to tinker on it for fun to make more money?
00:41:31.260Or because they can directly control it, like Christopher Wray said in some of those speeches, and he said it multiple times.
00:41:39.220So I think that is very, very interesting.
00:41:41.820And again, you look at TikTok executives and officials' history of misrepresentation, what they have said is Chinese engineers don't access U.S. user data.
00:42:13.580So everything that TikTok and ByteDance effectively says later falls to the truth, and then they say, oh, yeah, sorry, well, that doesn't happen again.
00:42:21.220Or we fired those guys, so everything's fine now.
00:42:23.680So in my mind, okay, the algorithm is – that's a big, big question, and there's a pattern of behavior.
00:43:01.140Yeah, so that was – I alluded to that firewall that TikTok has basically promised to the American people where they say, we are going to protect your data.
00:43:12.040And we're going to do that through Project Texas.
00:43:14.180And what Project Texas does is they say it erects that firewall.
00:43:19.420It makes it much more difficult, in their words, for Chinese employees, ByteDance employees, to access U.S. user data.
00:43:25.960They say they're going to store the U.S. user data in the U.S. before they've – we know from reporting that they, at least for a period of time, actually did store it in China prior to 2019.
00:43:36.620And, again, they misrepresented that until that was reported out in the open.
00:43:41.580And now they store it in the U.S. and Singapore.
00:43:43.900Again, it doesn't necessarily matter where you store the data if Chinese employees can access that data if it's stored here, if it's stored in Singapore.
00:43:52.600So they say we're just going to store it in the U.S.
00:43:54.440But, again, it doesn't necessarily matter where the data is stored.
00:43:57.660That is a red herring because we know the systems can access the data.
00:44:01.420And, frankly, the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of leverage over human beings with access to the data, too.
00:44:06.680So they can, frankly, lean on your grandma back in China in the homeland.
00:44:10.900And if you have an engineer who's working here for TikTok and they want to give up information.
00:44:16.080So there are big holes in Project Texas.
00:44:17.980They also say we have third-party oversight, U.S. company oversight, CFIUS, which is the big investigation that dragged on for two years about the national security issues run by, again, the Commerce Department.
00:44:31.280So I think Janet Yellen was actually at the helm of she's the chair of CFIUS.
00:44:36.480So this is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.
00:44:39.100And they say, OK, they're going to have oversight over U.S. data, too.
00:44:43.060But, again, we can't believe anything that TikTok says, given their history of misrepresentation and the fact that there are some technical issues with saying that Project Texas is going to solve all the problems.
00:44:59.040Are you pleasantly surprised that the Biden administration, at least ostensibly, is interested in banning TikTok?
00:45:07.640I am, if, in fact, they are interested in banning TikTok.
00:45:12.340So given the fact that they sort of, again, revoked Trump's initial executive order and put in place a framework that they really haven't seemed to implement yet, that's sort of a knock against them.
00:45:26.480I think something in their favor is, yes, they've actually talked about this in a serious way.
00:45:31.500I do think there are, you know, people within the administration who are still working hard.
00:45:35.680They recognize that this is an actual problem and then it's a bipartisan problem at that.
00:45:42.220But whether or not they get this over the finish line, I'm worried that now they're starting to sort of pull back and realize with their leftist constituency among, you know, young people, this could be a problem.
00:45:53.240I'm worried that those ideas might win the day.
00:45:56.760But but yeah, if we can keep going, if people on the Democratic side, like Senator Mark Warner, can continue to raise the alarm about these issues, then I think that's a good thing.
00:46:07.980I would also be surprised if he actually pushes this over the finish line, just some of the things that he has done that showed such a capitulation to China, such a weakness toward China, ending a lot of Trump era protections.
00:46:23.420I mean, it's hard for me to believe that he would potentially sacrifice the votes of young people, which I mean, realistically, he wouldn't.
00:46:30.540Those young people who are on the left are going to vote for the Democrat anyway, but he probably doesn't want to anger them.
00:46:37.540So, like you said, I would be surprised, too.
00:46:40.320But we can hope and hope that at least eventually these things don't happen overnight, but at least eventually someone can push it over the finish line.