Originally published by Gatestone Institute
Commentary
At a time when an invasion of Taiwan by Communist China looms ever larger, why worry about TikTok?
Targeted at American teens, TikTok is a mobile app for sharing short videos, owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance. After five short years on the market, it has more than one billion users worldwide. The app has lived under deep suspicion for much of that time, as American cyber-security and counter-intelligence experts have warned about its enormous reach and direct connections to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
During the administration of President Donald Trump, the White House considered an outright ban on the app. Senators as diverse as Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Josh Hawley (R-Ark.) led the charge to ban it or force its parent company to sell it. Nothing ever came of that push, and sale negotiations between ByteDance and both Microsoft and Oracle failed to reach a deal. The only concession made was that today, internet traffic to and from TikTok in the United States supposedly flows only through servers owned by Oracle, which is paid by ByteDance to manage the app within the U.S….