The Chinese network has a back door that they use to look at American’s and spread their point of view….
BUT?
The outfit has about 150 Million subscribers …..
THAT IS a LOT of people….
The US Government isn’t gonna be able to just shut the network down in America….
In the summer of 2020, in full re-election mode and looking for new ways to punish China, President Donald J. Trump threatened to cut off TikTok from the phones of millions of Americans unless its parent company agreed to sell all of its U.S. operations to American owners. The effort collapsed.
Now, more than two years later, after lengthy studies of how Chinese authorities could use the app for everything from surveillance to information operations, the Biden administration is attempting a strikingly similar move. It is better organized, vetted by lawyers, and coordinated with new bills in Congress that appear to have considerable bipartisan support.
Yet making TikTok safe from Chinese exploitation — as a tool for Chinese officials to surveil Americans’ tastes and whereabouts, as an entry point into the phones that contain their whole lives and as a way to pump out disinformation — turns out to be harder than it looks.
The tensions over the app will come to a head on Thursday, when TikTok’s Singapore-based chief executive, Shou Chew, testifies before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a hearing that will give Democrats and Republicans alike a rare chance to air their suspicions directly to the company. On Tuesday, Mr. Chew posted a TikTok from the company’s main account, declaring that “some politicians” are trying to take the app away from 150 million users in the United States, including small businesses.
But after two years of negotiations with TikTok about building in new protections, it is not clear there is anything the company can do, short of turning the entire operation over to Americans, that will satisfy the concerns of U.S. intelligence agencies. The Justice Department’s No. 2 official and others have effectively rejected proposals by TikTok’s corporate parent, ByteDance, to address the concerns.
Any decision to remove the app, either banning it for 150 million users in the United States or blocking further downloads, would be politically fraught for Mr. Biden. No one encapsulated the political dilemma more pithily than Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, who is at the center of new export controls imposed on high-technology goods to China….