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“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Geoffrey Cain says. “Because TikTok, although the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow the laws of China—laws created by the Chinese Communist Party.”
In a recent episode of EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek speaks with Cain, an award-winning journalist, technologist, and author of “The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China’s Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future.”
Cain recently testified before the U.S. Senate about TikTok and why he believes the social media app’s troubled emergence in the United States, its shadowy corporate structure, and its connection to China’s security and data laws make it a unique national security threat.
Jan Jekielek: Recently, you were in the U.S. Senate giving testimony about social media and national security, specifically about TikTok. What did you find?
Geoffrey Cain: TikTok is a national security threat to the United States. It’s a disaster waiting to happen, because TikTok, although the company denies it, is fundamentally obligated to follow the laws of China—laws created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok is an app that’s popular among Generation Z users. It’s the next wave of social media where anyone can create a short clip of themselves dancing to music or showing their cat. You can load up celebrities and see what they’re up to. The app seems harmless, but beneath the surface, there’s a lot going on. It was created five or six years ago by ByteDance, a Chinese company based in Beijing.
Then, there’s the Council on Foreign Investment in the United States [CFIUS]. It’s charged with reviewing foreign investments that might pose some kind of national security risk. CFIUS has reviewed investments in semiconductors, surveillance cameras, and military weaponry and components.
Now, TikTok is essentially a data-scooping machine. It’s getting your face, your voice, your behavior, your movements. It’s learning about you. Like all social media platforms, these systems are extremely profitable because they use that data to sell ads to consumers.
And yet, there wasn’t even a CFIUS review at the beginning. That should sound alarm bells. Why did TikTok decide not to do that review? It’s as if they sneaked into the market to place their software in the hands of the next generation.
Mr. Jekielek: Doesn’t that somehow create an opportunity to do a CFIUS review?
Mr. Cain: In 2020, the Trump administration initiated a CFIUS review. President Donald Trump wanted to get TikTok banned. TikTok challenged this review in court and challenged some of the decisions. For the past year, TikTok has been under a CFIUS review, but they’ve been very quiet about it. It’s not clear what’s going to happen. According to TikTok, some kind of agreement with the U.S. government will ensure that data sharing with China won’t be possible. That’s their claim, but I don’t totally believe it.
