There’s no question that TikTok is a national security threat to the United States.
President Trump has extended — for the fourth time — a deadline by which TikTok must be sold by ByteDance, its Chinese Communist-affiliated owner, or be banned in the United States.
The president has no right or power to do this. Bipartisan majorities of Congress passed a law, duly signed by President Joe Biden, requiring the divestment. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law’s constitutionality. But Donald Trump doesn’t care. He’s ignoring the law — and in effect unilaterally rewriting it.
Why? There’s no question that TikTok is a national security threat to the United States. As long as it’s controlled by an entity that must answer to Beijing, and as long as it uses technology and algorithms developed by such an organization, the app shouldn’t be on American phones. It spreads and amplifies divisive, vile propaganda wholly in the interest of the People’s Republic of China. It collects enormous amounts of sensitive data on the 170 million Americans who foolishly walk around with Chinese spyware in their pockets.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump’s deal with the CCP’s negotiators would create a new entity with a board dominated by Americans (one would even be appointed by the U.S. government). In addition:
Existing users in the U.S. would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing, people familiar with the matter said. TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance, the people said. U.S. software giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner, would handle user data at its facilities in Texas, they said. Silver Lake, a private-equity firm, and venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz are both longtime tech investors.
Read that again: “TikTok engineers will re-create a set of content-recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology licensed from TikTok’s parent ByteDance.”
In other words, nothing much will change about the never-ending stream of malignancy that TikTok perpetuates on America. But Donald Trump apparently doesn’t care about this inconvenient fact or the law that he has sworn to uphold. He just cares about getting a deal.