TikTok Search Results Allegedly Pose Significant Risks to National Security

Reported on September 14th, TikTok is offering users on news search results with misinformation involving politics, climate change, the CCP Virus, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and other news topics. On the same day, the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing where the participating expert claimed that TikTok was a disaster waiting to happen.

 Having analyzed the top 20 search results of 27 TikTok news topics, some media watchdog found that 19.5% of the videos contained false or misleading contents. Steven Brill, founder of the watchdog, said that the false and harmful information provided by TikTok, popular with young people, posed tremendous threats to users and questions whether ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company in Communist China, deliberately allowed the dissemination of misinformation to create confusion in the U.S. and other Western democracies.

 On September 14th, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs held a hearing to discuss the impact of social media on national security, in which Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s chief operating officer, attended with representatives from YouTube and Twitter. Geoffrey Cain, an expert on Beijing’s surveillance and social media at Lincoln Network, testified that the TikTok app with strong monitoring and data collecting capabilities was owned by a so-called “American company” that had to obey the CCP’s orders. He further noted that both TikTok’s branch in the U.S. and its developer parent company, ByteDance in Communist China, reported to the same shell company in the Cayman Islands and were managed by the same CEO.

 Cain added that the CCP totalitarian regime made an effort to obtain this data and use it to develop AI capabilities and conduct espionage against military and government officials. That was a Trojan horse constituting a severe risk to national security. He also issued a warning that TikTok was a disaster waiting to happen.