| Hi, it's Shelly in Hong Kong. A scantily-clad woman gyrates to a Chinese pop song while stir frying in a comically large wok in a clip that's soared to popularity on TikTok, the buzzy short video app U.S. lawmakers have suddenly deemed dangerous to the American people.
With lighthearted clips like this, it's perfectly logical to question, why, exactly, is an app known for teenage twerking and singing gummy bears a threat to U.S. national security? "TikTok is a potential counterintelligence threat we cannot ignore," two prominent senators wrote in a bipartisan letter last week to the acting U.S. national intelligence director. "China is using these apps to advance their foreign policy and globally suppress freedom of speech, expression and other freedoms that we as Americans so deeply cherish," wrote Senator Marco Rubio in a separate letter asking the U.S. Treasury Department to investigate whether TikTok poses a national security threat. TikTok categorically denies these accusations and has hired two former congressmen at a U.S. law firm to defend its claims that it doesn't house data from U.S. users in China, and that its global video app isn't censored by the Chinese government. I don't know who is right or wrong at this juncture. But I do agree with the importance of disabusing the narrative that just because the content on TikTok seems juvenile that the technology is too. TikTok's owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, is a hit app factory that has spent the last decade learning how to use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and facial recognition to figure out what people like and serve them endless streams of entertainment tailored to their interests and emotions. Its apps are used by billions of people, including 1.45 billion global downloads for TikTok alone. The company has years of data informing it on how people think, feel and act, making it an expert on what makes people tick and how to persuade them to watch, share or like certain content. Since the content is matched to individuals or groups of people, meaning that what I see on TikTok is often completely different from what you might see, it makes it pretty difficult for anyone monitoring the app to know which content is spreading and to whom. For example, for an article about TikTok I worked on in April, I spent dozens of hours on the app to assign the videos I saw to certain genres that could be dangerous for kids to watch, such as those that glorify suicide or emphasize sexual content. Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal recounted how Islamic State militants were posting propaganda videos of corpses parading through streets set to jihadist songs. You might not have seen those videos, but many people did. And if co-opted for state-backed influence campaigns, those algorithms could feasibly be tweaked to show certain videos to specific users without the general public immediately catching on. It's also why a lot of the Hong Kong protesters say that regardless of whether TikTok is censoring content or not, they fear posting on a social media site owned by ByteDance, a Beijing company that must hand over user information to Chinese authorities if asked, just like all its compatriots. Those powerful skills help explain why TikTok owner ByteDance, which is valued at $75 billion by CB Insights, is considering an IPO in the long term. It also suggests why U.S. lawmakers are afraid of the app: That kind of expertise could be attractive to authoritarian governments like China's, which indisputably knows the importance of information controls. Critics say American lawmakers and anti-China scaremongers are going after TikTok because they're worried about China's rising tech supremacy and fear a Chinese company excelling globally or rivaling homegrown giants like Facebook. That's probably also true. But let me remind you that even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had to publicly recant his initial claims that the social network he built wasn't used by foreign actors to sow division among Americans and influence the last presidential election.
If it happened on Facebook, who is to say it couldn't also happen on TikTok? At the very least, it's worth a look. | 
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