The new bill gives TikTok a choice to divest from the CCP’s control or face a ban. If it divests, Americans can continue using it, said Brendan Carr.
The House’s new bill to mitigate TikTok’s security risks in the United States is “so smart” because it requires TikTok to cut its ties with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said Brendan Carr, commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
The bill aims to protect national security, which differs from privacy laws, Mr. Carr said in an interview on Epoch TV’s “American Thought Leaders” program.
Laws that would protect Americans’ data privacy and online child protection laws will not prevent TikTok from jeopardizing American national security, he pointed out.
The new bill would grant the president authority to force the sale of a tech company providing online services or a social media company controlled by a foreign adversary.
Under the legislation, divestment is required only if an app, such as TikTok, is controlled by a foreign adversary—such as China, North Korea, Iran, or Russia—and only if it presents a “real national security threat” that is disclosed publicly, said Mr. Carr.
In this case, any individual, company, or entity that is not beholden to any foreign adversary can step in to acquire the app in order to sever its ties with Beijing, Mr. Carr explained, adding that the acquiring company does not have to be an American or Silicon Valley company.
Once TikTok’s connections with the CCP are cut off through new ownership, the social media platform can continue to operate in the United States, he said, calling the legislation “a structural remedy.”
This way, “the millions of Americans that love TikTok today can keep using it, but just simply in a way that is far more secure [not only] from their own personal perspective but also from America’s national security [standpoint],” the commissioner explained.
Mr. Carr mentioned that the Treasury Department successfully divested gay dating app Grindr after its acquisition by a Chinese tech company in 2018 sparked national security concerns. Grinder was sold to an American investment holding firm in 2020 and became a publicly traded company in 2022.
Dangers of TikTok
TikTok had been transferring users’ data to Beijing, and when this process was exposed, the company promised lawmakers that it would wall off U.S. user data from the CCP, said Mr. Carr.
However, it turned out that TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, had not protected the data and continued to transfer sensitive user information to China, he said.
“The reason is because [TikTok is] ultimately controlled and beholden by the CCP. There’s nothing that TikTok can do that will stop those data flows from going back to China,” Mr. Carr explained.
“The two core issues with TikTok are espionage and foreign influence,” said Mr. Carr, who has served as an FCC commissioner since 2017. “We’ve seen both repeatedly,” he added.
On the surface, TikTok is a fun app for sharing short videos, but in reality, “TikTok collects a tremendous amount of sensitive data on millions of Americans, [including] search and browsing history, keystroke patterns, biometrics, [and] location information,” said Mr. Carr.
During the last few years, he said, TikTok officials claimed that none of that data was shared with Beijing.
However, the commissioner explained that the data does not have to be shared with the Chinese regime. “What they do is they make it available to TikTok and ByteDance employees in Beijing, who are themselves members of the CCP.”
TikTok and its leadership in ByteDance have a CCP cell embedded right there, said Mr. Carr.
In 2023, TikTok reached 150 million users in the United States, and nearly 5 million businesses use its platform, according to a company statement.
In 2022, BuzzFeed broke a story revealing TikTok’s internal communications contradicted its claim and showed that U.S. data were repeatedly accessed from China.
Mr. Carr pointed out that “any entity that is inside of China, particularly if they’re a CCP member, is compelled by a national security law in China to do the bidding of the CCP surveillance apparatus and to keep it secret.”
“For instance, right when TikTok was negotiating a national security agreement with U.S. officials, a Beijing-based team surveilled the location of journalists who’ve been writing negative stories about TikTok,” he added.
Mr. Carr called this incident clear evidence of a “national security threat.”
He also provided an example of the CCP’s foreign influence operations. Before the 2022 midterm election, Chinese state media outlets created TikTok accounts without revealing their affiliation and used them to target selected U.S. politicians for criticism.
Impact on Users’ Mental Health
Apart from espionage and foreign influence, another concerning issue is TikTok’s impact on users’ mental health, said Mr. Carr.
People tend to think that TikTok works like Facebook—where a person interfaces with their friends or friends of their friends—but TikTok’s algorithm functions very differently from Facebook, he pointed out.
For example, a study reported by The New York Times found that TikTok showed 13-year-old girls content about inflicting self-harm and eating disorders within minutes after they set up their accounts, said Mr. Carr.
“TikTok itself isn’t allowed in China,” he said. The version of TikTok available in China is called Douyin, and its contents are very different from what young people using TikTok in the United States see.
Douyin shows children educational material, museum exhibits, and science experiments, he added.
ByteDance
Some people expressed concern that the CCP may not allow TikTok to break its ties with communist China as the new bill requires.
If Beijing’s assertion holds true that TikTok operates independently and its decisions are determined by investors in its parent company, ByteDance, then the divestment process will be easy, said Mr. Carr.
According to TikTok’s official website, ByteDance is a privately held global company founded by Chinese entrepreneurs and is “roughly 60 percent owned by global institutional investors (such as Blackrock, General Atlantic, and Susquehanna International Group), 20 percent owned by the company’s founders, and 20 percent owned by its employees.”
ByteDance has over 150,000 employees worldwide, according to the company’s website. TikTok stated that ByteDance employs over 7,000 Americans and “is not owned or controlled by any government or state entity.”
If, contrary to Beijing’s claim, TikTok is used for surveillance and foreign influence, then the divestment will pose some difficulties for the CCP, said Mr. Carr.
There are concerns that the Chinese regime could retaliate if ByteDance is forced to divest itself from TikTok within 180 days or if the app faces a ban in the United States, as the new measure stipulates.
However, Facebook, Twitter, and other American technology companies have already been banned in China, including the TikTok app itself, Mr. Carr pointed out.
Free Speech
Mr. Carr argued that the bill does not target Americans’ right to exchange information on TikTok, which is protected by the Constitution, but addresses the conduct of the service provider that poses a national security threat.
However, Elon Musk raised concerns that the legislation’s provisions could intensify censorship and government control of social media platforms.
“If it were just about TikTok, it would only cite ‘foreign control’ as the issue, but it does not,” Mr. Musk wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Mr. Musk’s remarks were prompted by a post from Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who voiced opposition to the bipartisan bill.
“The President will be given the power to ban WEB SITES, not just Apps. The person breaking the new law is deemed to be the U.S. (or offshore) INTERNET HOSTING SERVICE or App Store, not the ‘foreign adversary,’” Mr. Massie wrote on X, labeling the bill as a “trojan horse.”
Mr. Musk and Mr. Massie pointed to a provision in the bill penalizing internet hosting services for distributing, maintaining, or updating a “foreign adversary controlled application” within the United States.
Investor David Sacks, who built and invested in some iconic tech companies, also raised a similar concern.
“A simple way to improve the TikTok bill would be to clarify that it does not apply to any U.S. company unless it is majority owned/controlled by persons or entities from a foreign adversary country. Until then, this bill is clearly a Trojan Horse to control U.S. apps & websites,” Mr. Sacks said in a post on X.
Mr. Musk also agreed with Mr. Sacks’s concern.
Caden Pearson contributed to this report.