TikTok is causing national security worries, according to FBI Director Chris Wray, who warned that management of the popular video-sharing app is in the hands of a Chinese government “that doesn’t share our values.”
The FBI was concerned that the Chinese had control over the app’s recommendation system, “which allows them to change material and, if they want to, use it for influence operations,” according to Wray.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which examines foreign acquisitions in the United States for potential national security threats, ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok in 2020 due to concerns that U.S. user data might be handed on to China’s communist government. Wray stated that Chinese enterprises must effectively “perform whatever the Chinese government wants in terms of information sharing or acting as an instrument of the Chinese government So there’s plenty of reason to be concerned just from that.”
In 2020, former president Donald Trump made an attempt to prevent new users from downloading WeChat and TikTok as well as to forbid other transactions that would have effectively blocked the use of the apps in the United States, but he was unsuccessful in doing so after losing several legal battles.