China\u2019s \u2018infiltration\u2019 of civil discourse in the United States poses an \u2018immediate\u2019 threat to Democracy and is one of the \u2018greatest threats we face today\u2019 in terms of national security, according to an expert on China.\u00a0<\/p>\n
TikTok is not just a technological concern, it is not just a social media problem, TikTok is today China\u2019s greatest asymmetric advantage against America,\u2019 Michael Sobolik, author of the new book \u2018Countering China\u2019s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance,\u2019 told Fox News Digital.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u2018It represents the most immediate threat to American democracy that the Chinese Communist Party poses,\u2019 he continued.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s role in \u2018infiltrating our civil discourse\u2019 through TikTok represents one of the \u2018most important problem sets in US-China relations,\u2019 Sobolik explained, because \u2018you have about half of America on one app that the Chinese Communist\u00a0Party controls, and they can\u00a0manipulate public opinion and spread propaganda.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s a huge problem.\u2019<\/p>\n
Sobolik, a Senior Fellow in Indo-Pacific Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council, told Fox News Digital that 170 million Americans are on the social media platform with 150 million of them on the site for at least an hour a day. A large chunk of those users, Sobolik said, rely on the platform for news, which the Chinese government is using to its advantage.<\/p>\n
The Chinese Communist Party controls TikTok, because TikTok\u2019s parent company ByteDance is domiciled inside of China,\u2019 Sobolik said. \u2018As such, they must comply with any requests that they receive from Beijing to turn over U.S. user data, to censor content, or to boost content. They have no recourse of saying no to the CCP. There have already been documented instances of TikTok surveilling U.S. journalists to try to figure out who they were talking to inside of the company. ByteDance has already pledged its cooperation to work with Beijing to hone its algorithm to advance the CCP\u2019s interests.\u2019<\/p>\n
Members of Congress have been debating over the past several months whether to ban TikTok in the United States or force the sale of the company to an entity outside of China. Opponents of the bills on the Republican side have argued that banning the popular social media app \u2018goes against the First Amendment.\u2019<\/p>\n
Sobolik flatly rejected that idea.<\/p>\n
\u2018None of this is a mystery,\u2019 Sobolik said. \u2018This is documented. There are instances of TikTok\u2019s censoring content about Tibet, the Uyghurs, Tiananmen Square and other sensitive issues to the Chinese Communist Party. The concerns with TikTok have nothing to do with free speech. The concerns for TikTok are that an adversarial nation controls one of the biggest pillars of information in the United States today. And if you think that\u2019s only a theoretical concern, imagine if China goes to war with Taiwan. And then, as that is happening, floods TikTok with pro-CCP messages, with disinformation about what\u2019s happening, and tries to push a public opinion campaign that America should stay out and not do anything to help Taiwan.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018China has one of the strongest abilities to manipulate U.S. public opinion in its grasp today. This should be a chilling reality. This should send a shiver down the spines of every American.\u2019<\/p>\n
Sobolik continued, \u2018The content you see on TikTok may feel unique to you, but you are being fed content from an algorithm that is controlled by America\u2019s chief adversary. This is a Trojan horse inside of the United States, and it is high past time for members of Congress to take this seriously. To put the country first and to kick this Trojan horse out of America\u2019s walls. We cannot allow this app to continue to function under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018America has a gun pointed at its head every single day in the information realm. We have to take care of this issue and we must do it now. There are no constitutional concerns of any meaning here. This is a national security concern, and it is one of the greatest concerns that we face today.\u2019<\/p>\n
It remains unclear whether Congress has the necessary\u00a0political appetite to ban or dissolve TikTok, and\u00a0Sobolik told Fox News Digital that he believes that question is \u2018going to be one of the biggest tests for America.\u2018<\/p>\n
\u2018If we can fix this TikTok problem, that will be one of the most encouraging signs that we\u2019ve seen in decades about our seriousness with protecting our liberty and our freedom and for opposing tyranny,\u2019 Sobolik said. \u2018If we let this problem go, if we don\u2019t fix it, we may as well go home and get out of the great power competition altogether.<\/p>\n
\u2018Because again, remember, protecting yourself is the bare minimum. Good defense might win NBA basketball championships, but good defense is the bare minimum. It\u2019s good housekeeping. You don\u2019t get a gold star for taking care of your own homeland. You get a gold star for going out in opposing authoritarian regimes. Cold wars are won by seizing the initiative and going on the offensive. If we cannot sever TikTok from CCP control, we have much bigger problems.\u2019<\/p>\n
In a statement to Fox News Digital, a TikTok spokesperson said \u2018multiple media outlets have reported\u2019 that \u2018there is not a shred of evidence\u2019 to the \u2018outlandish claims\u2019 that TikTok is a vessel of the Chinese government.<\/p>\n
\u2018The reality is the ban bill would trample the First Amendment rights of 170 million Americans and devastate 7 million small businesses nationwide,\u2019 the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n\n
China\u2019s \u2018infiltration\u2019 of civil discourse in the United States poses an \u2018immediate\u2019 threat to Democracy and is one of the \u2018greatest threats we face today\u2019 in terms of national security, according to an expert on China.\u00a0 TikTok is not just a technological concern, it is not just a social media problem, TikTok is today China\u2019s <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":17982,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17981","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}