In his first term, President Trump came to understand that TikTok was a creation of Bytedance, a company controlled by the Chinese government—specifically the CCP. So, in August of 2020, he signed an executive order requiring the CCP-controlled ByteDance to divest TikTok. A month later that order got blocked by a court injunction. But that was reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.
As it turned out, the executive order to restructure TikTok was unenforced until 2024, when the Israeli war against Hamas intensified and TikTok’s distinctly pro-Palestinian bias was instrumental in disrupting many college and university campuses across the U.S. Congress proposed and passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which again ordered that ByteDance divest TikTok due to alleged security concerns and pro-Palestinian bias. The bill was signed into law, and was upheld by the Supreme Court, following a lawsuit challenge from TikTok. That law set a deadline of January 19, 2025, for TikTok’s ban in the U.S. unless it divested itself from the CCP-controlled ByteDance.
The TikTok ban took another twist on Inauguration Day, January 20, 2025, when Trump signed an executive action that delays enforcement of the TikTok ban for 75 days. Some have observed that Trump thinks well of TikTok presumably because TikTok delivered a lot of youth votes on November 5.
Trump is mistaken if he thinks that the restructuring of TikTok can be pulled off quickly, given the risk of residual backdoors to China that are likely baked into the system. Everyone understands that Facebook harvests data from users’ devices even when they are not on the Facebook site. According to Sam Faddis, a 20-year veteran of the CIA, Tik Tok is four to five times more intrusive than Facebook in harvesting data from Americans who have downloaded the TikTok app. And that means that all such Americans’ email, text messages and other information gets sucked out of their devices and ends up on servers in China.
By some estimates, half the U.S. population, about 170 million people, are subscribers to TikTok. A good number of those users under 35 years of age are seemingly addicted to TikTok videos, which are short and cover a range of subjects—some silly, some controversial, and others with commercial value. But make no mistake, the TikTok app together with its algorithms that were developed by Chinese engineers have created weapons aimed at the heart of the United States.
Those who think this is a free speech issue are mistaken. TikTok is a backdoor attack on unwitting Americans by a hostile communist regime. Former FBI director Chris Wray publicly testified numerous times that “the CCP dedicates more resources in cyber-attacks against the United States than they do against all other countries on the planet combined.”
At a recent meeting of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, Dr. John Lenczowski reminded attendees that much of the thinking of the Chinese Communist Party is rooted in a long tradition dating back 2,500 years to the war fighting philosophy of Sun Tzu, encapsulated in his written work, The Art of War, which elaborates on various approaches to strategic deception in order to defeat the enemy without having to fire a shot.
An important part of this Chinese unrestricted warfare against the U.S. is to deceive Americans into believing that mainland China is just a normal state—a country that honors international norms. The net result of some two generations of this deception warfare has been a psychological disarmament of the United States.
Lenczowski points out that TikTok is used as an avenue of cooptation of an important segment of the U.S. population. In various videos, TikTok has subliminally discredited the American system of democracy and constitutional order. At times, such as the early period of the George Floyd riots of 2020, TikTok leaders distributed videos to those whom they believed were likely to riot in favor of Black Lives Matter. And because TikTok had so much accurate information on Americans through their many years of data collection, TikTok decision-makers were able to target likely rioters. They also provided professional advice on how to do maximum damage while keeping the perpetrators safe from being arrested.
Another speaker, Grant Newsham, a retired colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps, focused on the CCP’s use of TikTok to indoctrinate the U.S. military, pointing out their ability to access the minds of all the nearly 1.3 million active-duty troops and 768,000 national guard and reserve members, as well as new recruits. He concluded by noting that “you just have to manipulate the military a little bit to make a military much less effective.”
In delaying the banning and dismantling of TikTok, President Trump needs to determine whether the kind of weapon the CCP has created in TikTok can be rendered benign, even if it becomes wholly owned by an American company. The Chinese are notorious for welding backdoors into their systems as they did with Huawei. We chose not to take a chance with Huawei, and we should not take a chance with TikTok when vestiges of Chinese deceptive engineering could still be present and operated.
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Scott S. Powell is senior fellow at Discovery Institute and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. His timeless book, Rediscovering America, has been #1 Amazon New Release in the history genre for eight weeks. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1637581599. Reach him at scottp@discovery.org