After years of tough talk about China, President Trump finally moved to shore up the free world’s soft underbelly in the new Cold War: data.
With two executive orders announced near midnight on Thursday, Trump gave Chinese firms ByteDance and Tencent just 45 days to sell off their respective social media subsidiaries, TikTok and WeChat, respectively, to owners not answerable to the regime in Beijing.
In contrast to his crowd-pleasing tariffs against China, Trump is knowingly taking an electoral gamble with these executive orders. According to the New York Times, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Sen. Lindsey Graham were trying to convince Trump to soften his TikTok opposition out of political expedience. But Trump is right to treat WeChat and TikTok the same way the United States treated Soviet espionage during the Cold War.
Although WeChat openly censors and collects the data of users registered in mainland China in cooperation with the Chinese Communist Party, the company has maintained that it does not spy on non-mainland Chinese users. This is a lie. The University of Toronto’s Citizens Lab found that users with no connection to mainland China “undergo content surveillance wherein … files are analyzed for content that is politically sensitive in China.”
Given that WeChat openly colludes with the Chinese government to allow it to scour user data, that means that data of American users — for example, messaging and location services — are being directly stolen and handed to a foreign adversary that is currently trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.
As for TikTok, developers have reverse-engineered the app and discovered that it monitors users’ other apps and hijacks hardware and network data. And ByteDance appears to collude with the Communist Party just as shamelessly as Tencent does.
Not only does TikTok censor speech about topics such as the Xinjiang concentration camps and Uighur persecution, but it has also openly collaborated with Chinese Communist media organizations and is still subject to the same Chinese National Intelligence Law that forces private companies in China to supply information to the state intelligence apparatus.
Even if we take TikTok’s word for it that the Chinese government has never asked for Americans’ user data, TikTok would be required under Chinese law to provide it if ever asked.
Democrats spent three years subjecting the nation to their Russiagate hoax conspiracy theory charade because a couple of Putin-paid thugs posted memes on Facebook that were seen by a mere handful of people. In contrast, TikTok has been downloaded 165 million times, meaning that if each download is unique, nearly half the U.S. population is being actively surveilled by ByteDance and, by extension, an enemy nation seeking to rig our upcoming elections.
So, where is the outrage? To the contrary — media elites are defending the app, responding favorably to what appears to be an aggressive and well-funded lobbying campaign by ByteDance. Who is the puppet now?
Trump’s orders will result in lawsuits and a debate over whether to expand the Emergency Powers Act further. Whatever the outcome, the public must be prepared for a paradigm shift in how we view tech gadgets in the context of Chinese espionage. Trump has done the right thing here, even if it is not necessarily the popular thing.
