Patriotism is a value that used to be familiar to all Americans. It seems to have been forgotten . But what has been forgotten can be relearned, and on this occasion, we all have a duty to try. Otherwise, we will cede control over countless world events — and truth itself, as far as digital media is concerned — to a genocidal regime that hates America. That is something that I hope no American is willing to tolerate.

While wars are still being fought from trenches and tunnels, wartime influence campaigns are dramatically different. Here in the United States, we have given our chief global adversary unrestricted access to manipulate public opinion. And the results are entirely predictable. Torrents of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel content now flood TikTok.

We made a “ big mistake ” not banning the popular social media platform when we had a chance. The Marxist bias on TikTok reflects more than left-wing thought among millennials and Generation Z. It reflects the app’s subservience to the world’s most powerful Marxist regime: the Chinese Communist Party.

Consider the fact that in China, the international version of TikTok is banned and its owner, ByteDance, operates a heavily censored local version called Douyin that is mostly restricted to benign educational videos. Meanwhile, in the United States, the app’s algorithm serves up pro-terrorist content, as well as content encouraging all manner of extremism, crime, and anti-social behavior.

Claims that TikTok intentionally fosters support for Hamas are primarily “anecdotal” at this time because ByteDance closely guards the details of its algorithms and data from public scrutiny, but that doesn’t mean such reports are unreliable or untrue. In fact, they fit with a pattern of behavior by the company to echo the Chinese Communist Party’s line and silence dissenters.

I’ve been warning for years that Beijing uses its control over ByteDance to undermine support for U.S. allies. ByteDance already censors references to the Uyghur genocide and downplays the status of Taiwan. What are the chances that it’s not taking an active role in the conflict between Israel and Hamas, especially when China’s government refuses to condemn Hamas and promotes blatantly antisemitic rhetoric through its propagandists? The answer is “very low” — and they get even lower when you look at the big picture.

The truth is that pro-terrorist social media algorithms are just the tip of the iceberg of Beijing’s electronic espionage and influence campaigns. In May and June, Chinese hackers invaded numerous U.S. government email accounts, including those of our ambassador to China, Nicholas Burns, and Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE). Even the highest levels of the Biden administration were vulnerable, as Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo discovered when the hackers compromised her email just as she was getting ready to visit China.

In August, Meta announced that it had uncovered roughly 8,000 fake accounts used by Chinese government agencies to spread Marxist propaganda. Together, these accounts constituted “the largest known cross-platform covert influence operation in the world.” That same month, Chinese agents employed artificial intelligence to sow disinformation about the fires in Maui, posting fake imagery that blamed the disaster on a secret U.S. military weapons test.

These incidents reveal a coordinated effort by Beijing to shape international political narratives and exploit divisions within America. They are likely the work of the Strategic Support Force, a relatively new division of the People’s Liberation Army dedicated to cyber and psychological operations. This is far more serious than a spam scheme. It’s about a war — a war fought with data rather than bullets, but a war nonetheless. “We are the tip of the knife, we are that iron fist, fighting decisive battles on frontiers of high altitude, seizing strategic vantage points,” read the lyrics of a Chinese Communist Party song about this new cyber army.

In this war, Beijing’s No. 1 enemy is the United States. General Secretary Xi Jinping is explicit that he wants the CCP to be the “gravedigger of capitalism,” and he holds fast to Mao Zedong’s admonition for China to “overtake” America as the most powerful country in the world. There is no excuse for being blind to this reality, which no one in the East or the West is trying to hide.

So why are we doing so little about it? Why does our national government continue to allow TikTok and other Chinese companies to influence and corrupt young people? Why have our computer companies spent years working in China to develop the artificial intelligence that Beijing is now weaponizing against us? Why, for so long, have our media producers deferred to a genocidal regime that hates the United States?

Even as the Biden administration cracks down on some technology transfers to China, we need to have greater clarity about the threats that we face. The Chinese Communist Party has embarked on a whole-of-society effort to manipulate the internet in its favor and to our detriment. Attempting to counter this effort is neither histrionic nor anti-free speech, as TikTok’s apologists claim . It’s a patriotic response to an adversary’s sustained assault on our freedoms. This is an existential threat to our nation.

Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator for Florida and serves as the vice chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence.