The Invisible Threat of TikTok Against US National Security: Chinese State-Affiliated Intelligence Collection and Cyber Enabled Influence Operations

There is a general misunderstanding on why the US Government has pressured TikTok, a social media company owned by the Chinese internet company ByteDance,1 to divest the US version of its application. Although TikTok and the US national security community attempted to develop an alternative solution, the US Government still cites insurmountable security concerns of Chinese government influence – Chinese state-owned enterprises maintain a 1% stake in ByteDance domestic operations and the CCP ensures access to collected data through its various national legal requirements.2 In order to illuminate TikTok's threat to US national security, I will analyze various open-source reports, declassified intelligence reports, court documents derived from FBI special investigations and national security assessments, translated Chinese source documents, and media reports. I will provide a historical background on TikTok and China's development of cyber capabilities. Then, I will define how TikTok acts uniquely as a Chinese data collection platform by assessing its privacy policy, data harvesting techniques, addictive algorithms, and Chinese government accessibility to these data sets. I will explore the implications of bulk data along with artificial intelligence (AI), to include the advantages of processing, targeting, and self-learning models. I will also focus on the covertness of TikTok intelligence collection, influence operations, and its over-arching objectives. Then, I plan to analyze People's Liberation Army military doctrine on civil-military fusion and joint information operations to predict potential militarization of TikTok intelligence and influence capabilities through information warfare. Finally, I will conclude on summarizing the TikTok threat to national security and develop feasible policy options to mitigate this risk.