Is TikTok actually a threat?
Analysing the risks of Chinese social media
The Investigator | No. 01/2025
It wasn’t long after TikTok’s launch in the United States, in 2018, before concerns were raised over its potential threats to national security. The first National Security Review was ordered by the US Government just a little over a year later.
The application became embroiled in the trade war between Washington and Beijing under Donald Trump, President of the US, and the press depicted the app as a symbolic chess piece in the battle between the world’s two largest economies.
But how can the TikTok tug-of-war be reduced to a battle of ‘East versus West’ when the Indian Government imposed a blanket ban of the social media application in 2020, citing national security concerns? And what exactly are the concerns around TikTok and national security?
In short, there are concerns that:
Consumer data could be handed over to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) via the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance.
The CCP could manipulate the algorithm to suggest content to consumers intended to influence elections and disseminate narratives which suit the party or are otherwise to the interests of the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
For the sake of clarity, remember that TikTok does not function in the PRC – its local equivalent is Douyin. TikTok is the international version of Douyin, which are both owned by ByteDance. Due to the CCP censorship, any content appearing on TikTok cannot be accessed in the PRC.
Does TikTok hand over consumer data to the CCP?
There has been no evidence that TikTok has provided the CCP with consumer data from the US, or any other country. But, according to the PRC’s National Intelligence Law of 2017, as a subsidiary of Bytedance, TikTok would be required to ‘cooperate’ with the CCP by providing any information deemed relevant for national security upon request. And in authoritarian regimes like the CCP, definitions of ‘relevant’ information for national security can be rather loose:
Article 7: All organisations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of. The State is to protect individuals and organisations that support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.
Article 14: National intelligence work institutions lawfully carrying out intelligence efforts may request that relevant organs, organisations, and citizens provide necessary support, assistance, and cooperation.
While there has been no evidence of consumer data being handed over to the CCP, it has been confirmed that Bytedance employees in the PRC were tracking the IP addresses of American journalists via TikTok. In 2022, it was reported that Bytedance was planning to track the journalists’ locations, in an attempt to confirm the identity of certain TikTok employees who had recently leaked information to the press.
Four employees of Bytedance, both in the US and the PRC, were dismissed after it was discovered that they were planning to spy on journalists to see if they had been in the same place as the employees suspected of leaking information. While the spying attempt failed, TikTok and Bytedance employees across the US and the PRC improperly obtained the journalists’ data. It is therefore clear that user data from the US can flow back into the PRC.
According to Brendan Carr, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the US:
At its core, TikTok functions as a sophisticated surveillance tool that harvests extensive amounts of sensitive data from search and browsing history, keystroke patterns, location data, and biometrics including face prints and voice prints.
Perhaps this explains why the app is banned on government devices in the United Kingdom (UK), Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Latvia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Taiwan. It is also banned on devices issued by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and European Union (EU).
Does TikTok disseminate Communist propaganda?
TikTok denies that it acts as a mouthpiece for the CCP. This may be true, but a study published by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) at Rutgers University in the US in June 2024 conducted an experiment of entering key words of topics that are often censored in the PRC. The researchers created 24 accounts on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and entered relevant keywords (‘Uyghur’, ‘Tibet’, etc.) and found that on TikTok, far more pro-CCP content showed up in relation to these topics, than on the other platforms in the experiment (Instragram, YouTube, etc.). It remains unclear how these algorithms are set, but the same applies to social media from outside of the PRC – it is a more general problem, which many legislatures still need to address.
Does TikTok use its algorithm to influence local politics abroad?
Recent unconfirmed reports say that anti-Trump content on TikTok is censored in the US, but available in the UK. What do the confirmed reports say?
In October 2024, the New York Times reported that an attorney general in Kentucky filed a complaint against TikTok for developing an internal strategy to use content on its platform to win favour from senator Mitch McConnell and other politicians. Meanwhile, the EU has opened a formal investigation into TikTok regarding Russian interference in the Romanian presidential elections in December 2024, due to ‘serious indications’ that bots in Russia were deployed to boost the prominence of Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate with a range of peculiar views.
Conclusion
This Investigator has showcased that civilian data from free and open countries has been accessed in the PRC. Once the data flows back into the PRC, how could one trace whether it has been passed on to the CCP?
One potential risk in the UK, for example, could be the tracking of the Hong Kongers who fled to Britain to escape prosecution in the special administrative region that is now subject to CCP national security law. Beijing has issued arrest warrants for some of them – if the CCP can compel Chinese companies to cooperate on intelligence matters, who is to say that it may not attempt to track them via TikTok, as it did with the American journalists?
According to data from Google, TikTok is being used as the primary search engine of the so-called ‘Generation Z’, the demographic of people born between the mid-1990s and early 2010s. Therefore, the significance of the algorithm controlling the content of the application becomes clear.
It is important to remember that social media platforms in free and open nations have also been misused by government figures – recall the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The difference is that the risk of data misuse is even greater if the platform hails from an authoritarian regime, especially one ideologically opposed to democracy and with some of the most brutal suppression of human rights.
Grace Theodoulou is the Policy Fellow at the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy.
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A most useful summary of the concerns about TikTok; many thanks.