TikTok’s Trojan Horse: Why the App is Raising Concerns about The United States’ National Security

Adrik Bagdasarian, ‘23 International Affairs, Woodson Martin Democracy Fellow 

TikTok, the app that has taken the world by storm with its addictive short videos, has sparked a heated debate over its potential to threaten the United States’ national security. On March 23, 2023, U.S. policymakers questioned TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew in a tense 5-hour hearing. In the hearing, most questions revolved around two central concerns to U.S. national security. Firstly, concerns about data collection practices that could potentially compromise American national security interests, especially due to TikTok’s ownership by Chinese company ByteDance. Secondly, the concern is that TikTok’s algorithm is recklessly showing its users content that could be especially harmful to youth.

ByteDance, a technology company headquartered in Beijing, China, was founded in 2012 by Zhang Yiming, a Chinese entrepreneur. Despite TikTok being ByteDance’s smash hit, the company created numerous other apps before its release, including “Toutiao,” a news aggregator that amassed 300 million daily active users in China. Subsequently, the TikTok-like short-video app Douyin was released in 2016, which has reached over 700 million daily users who are primarily located in China. A year later, ByteDance released TikTok. Since its release in 2017, it has amassed more than 1.5 billion users and was subsequently banned in China.

Despite TikTok’s explosion in popularity and being the most downloaded app of 2022, ByteDance has received global criticism due to its ties to the Chinese government and data collection practices. While much of how user data can be weaponized is currently unknown, one thing is certain with TikTok’s data collection practices: the app collects an abundance of data. According to the TikTok terms of service, the app tracks personal contacts, calendars, information about which device you’re using, which operating system, and your physical location. The app also tracks the objects and settings that appear in a user’s videos and the text of the words spoken. The concern for policymakers is that, despite ByteDance not having a direct observable connection with the Chinese government, it is within Chinese law to make users’ personal data available to the Chinese Communist Party. Refusing to turn over data collected by the app would result in ByteDance’s criminal conviction in China. The Chinese tech industry has seen a similar case of refused governmental cooperation with Alibaba’s cofounder and tech magnate, Jack Ma, who, after criticizing the government’s regulatory and banking practices, mysteriously disappeared from the public eye.

Despite the great unknown of how China might use user data strategically against U.S. national security interests, one compelling case has already caught the attention of the Justice Department. In December 2022, a leaked internal email between ByteDance employees and the company’s chief internal auditor revealed that the company was utilizing user data from TikTok to track and spy on the physical location of journalists. The two journalists from Buzzfeed and Financial Times were investigating stories at TikTok and had met with anonymous TikTok employees. In an unsuccessful attempt to identify and silence the anonymous employees, TikTok tracked the IP addresses of the journalists through the app.

Amid public criticism of unethical data collection practices, TikTok has unveiled “Project Texas,” a $1.5-billion corporate restructuring plan in partnership with U.S.-based technology company Oracle. Under Project Texas, Oracle would store all U.S. user data in domestic data centers. The project operations would also be monitored by an in-house committee approved by the U.S. government called “TikTok U.S. Data Security.” In the March 2023 congressional hearing of TikTok’s CEO, there was bipartisan pessimism towards Project Texas’ proposed solution, revolving around the reasoning that domestic data collection would only partially address national security concerns. Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers remarked that Project Texas was a “marketing scheme.” Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone argued it wasn’t a feasible solution and said it was “simply not acceptable.” Republican Rep. Bob Latta doubted the effectiveness of the project and found it not “useful.”

The second and most easily observed concern from TikTok is the addictive nature of the app, specifically with its algorithm overseen by a foreign adversary. According to recent Reuters data, a quarter of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from TikTok. Compellingly, this number had tripled in the past few years since 2020, when only 9% of adults under 30 reported TikTok as their primary news source. Additionally, since 2020, TikTok has been one of the only social media outlets to see its popularity as a news source increase, with popular social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Snapchat, and LinkedIn all declining in popularity. Not only has TikTok exploded as a news source but also as an addictive app. In 2021, TikTok users spent an average of 25.7 hours per month on the app- trumping apps like Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook, which formerly dominated the market of attention.

Social media algorithms are dangerous to users, especially the most vulnerable cohort, young people. Young people (aged 10-19) comprise TikTok’s largest cohort, approximately 32.5% of total users. Why is this a national security concern? Consider the case of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a U.K. teen whose suicide was ruled as a result of “the negative effects of online content” after Instagram’s algorithm showed her 2,100 posts related to suicide in the months leading up to her death. Russell’s case resulted from an algorithm of an app owned by a U.S.-based company, Meta (Facebook).  What would happen, then, if a foreign adversary could strategically weaponize algorithms of popular social media, similar to Russia’s weaponization of social media during the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections?

The dangerous curation of TikTok’s algorithm was a central topic of the March 2023 congressional hearing for the app and has been a concern to the FBI; director Christopher A. Wray warned that the algorithm could be used for “influence operations.” During the congressional hearing, TikTok videos were used as examples to exhibit the dangerous algorithm, including one video suggesting that the viewer “kill themself” and another video with audio detailing a graphic suicide over an aesthetic visual. While not explicitly mentioned by the congressional hearing, these videos were part of the “Corecore” trend on TikTok- one that romanticizes suicide and depression. When writing this article, the Corecore hashtag has a total of 2.3 billion videos associated with the trend. While some older audiences may discredit Corecore as “just another trend,” it is important to note that suicide is the second leading cause of death for youth aged 10-14, who coincidentally make up the largest and most vulnerable cohort of users on the app.

Ironically, a new trend on TikTok emerged after the congressional hearing: defending TikTok against United States regulation. If TikTok is a trojan horse for the Chinese information war against the United States, it is working, and fast. With every new generation, Americans are feeling increasingly less proud to live in the United States, and an app like TikTok has the immense potential to propagate more anti-American and harmful content to its vulnerable users.