A lawsuit filed by a former ByteDance employee (ByteDance owns TikTok) alleges that a special unit of the Chinese Communist Party inside the company monitors its apps and has access to all its data. “The (party) Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” the employee’s complaint reads, according to today’s New York Times.
TikTok is part of China’s campaign of cognitive warfare against the United States and other democracies. As co-author Michael McLaughlin and I argue in Battlefield Cyber, TikTok must be banned. Some 150 million Americans are literally addicted to it and it is feeding them an endless stream of mindless drivel mixed in with soft propaganda. It has achieved real power over the minds of millions of Americans. That is not just some theory. It is a hard, cold fact.
