Back in November of 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned lawmakers on the Hill about the dangers of Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
“We do have national security concerns, obviously from the FBI’s end, about TikTok,” he told the House Homeland Security Committee in a hearing at the time. “They include the possibility that the Chinese government could use it to control data collection on millions of users, or control the recommendation algorithm which could be used for influence operations if they so choose, or to control software on millions of devices.”
“I guess my point is that just to tie it all up, [TikTok] is a substantial national security threat for the country of a kind that we didn’t face in the past,” he added.
Numerous states have banned TikTok on government devices, including South Dakota, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and twenty-four other states.
“All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States,” Wray said. “That should concern us.”
Well, apparently it doesn’t concern Team Biden — they just opened a new TikTok account to share a message from President Biden for the Super Bowl.
From AP News:
Biden isn’t expected to personally join the platform, aides said, nor the others in his administration. The account will be run entirely by the campaign team in an effort to reach voters in an ever-fragmented American population, particularly as younger voters gravitate away from traditional platforms. The inaugural post featured the president being quizzed on the Super Bowl — and included a reference to the latest political conspiracy theory centering on music superstar Taylor Swift.
Both the FBI and the Federal Communications Commission have warned that TikTok owner ByteDance could share user data — such as browsing history, location and biometric identifiers — with China’s authoritarian government. Biden in 2022 banned the use of TikTok by the federal government’s nearly 4 million employees on devices owned by its agencies, with limited exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes. The secretive and powerful Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has been reviewing the app for years.
Team Biden says they are taking the appropriate security measures — but is it worth the risk?
