TikTok as a National Security Threat?

Listening to Sherly Sandberg (re Bloomberg) speak today, it was noteworthy to hear Facebook's attack on TikTok as a faster-growing ecosystem of ByteDance over the supposed 3.8 Billion users in Facebook's "family of apps". She was careful to point out that she (and Facebook) believes TikTok is a threat to American values.

It's very easy for Facebook to lobby congress to consider ByteDance a "national security" threat to the American version of the internet. Even SCMP owned by Alibaba reports that a Senate subcommittee says the personal data of the popular video app’s users is at risk of hacking by Beijing.

I've spoken already how the "OK Boomer" movement could have been manufactured as a generational war of GenZ vs. Boomers to achieve their desired results, i.e. a weaker leader on trade than Donald Trump, moving the compass of American values to the left. It's not hard to hack democracy and popular sentiment within key states in the United States at this point.

But is ByteDance anywhere near a threat to Facebook or America's National Security? It's simply a Chinese ecosystem of apps that is more popular than Facebook's apps for young people. TikTok has spread in 2019 at scale in places like India, hardly impacting America.

Regulators are having a second look at ByteDance's acquisition of the music meme company. TikTok gobbling up Musical.ly wasn't very surprising, as music memes are a hit and it had a natural synergy with the product TikTok was trying to create.

As TikTok scales in advertising with its incredible reach, maybe then it would be a threat to Facebook as it reaches GenZ and Alpha cohorts better than Instagram or Snapchat Ads do.

Facebook has violated many antitrust issues (e.g. acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram for example) and is now pointing the finger at a Chinese startup that it now views as a direct competitor, that's convenient.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, or CFIUS, has contacted TikTok’s Chinese parent, Bytedance, over concerns that its acquisition of social media app Musical.ly poses a national security risk.

However any Chinese company that scales globally functionally is a threat to American dominance of the internet, whether you want to point the finger at Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance, Didi or others - take your pick. There are plenty more in the pipeline.

A viral-micro video app a threat to National Security? It just really makes you wonder at how America exports its democratic values and the propaganda war with Chinese whose government has full authority and control over tech companies under its jurisdiction. To expect ByteDance not to practice censorship is kind of crazy, all things considered.

China's version of the internet will only become more influential as the light fades of Silicon Valley who believe more in monopolies than innovation. There's no changing the choices the United States has made in the last decades.

Consumers still think Facebook is free, even after all the data harvesting and advertising and privacy invasion.

ByteDance, however, knows how to make more "sticky" apps if not quite a chat-utility the size of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger or Instagram as some bizarre kind of Millennial ID storytelling landing page.

CFIUS reached out to Bytedance after a number of U.S. lawmakers, including Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., publicly called for an inquiry into the company.

After hearing Sherly Sandburg speak, however, one wonders if this is coming from Congress or Facebook itself? America doesn't even have the legislature to deal with regulating companies like Google or Facebook.

In last year’s U.S. Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act, CFIUS explicitly defined its purview to include companies holding “sensitive personal data.”

Even MIT Tech Review thinks this is a story worth covering. So is this headline bait or simply cold tech propaganda wars or a preview of how the two internets of the world will collide, in a join or die type scenario. If China's internet wins we might be facing global censorship and the beginnings of a world state (sometimes referred to as the new world order). Companies like Huawei and ByteDance might be one day seen as the founding companies of what that becomes.

Reuters notes TikTok has been growing more popular among U.S. teenagers at a time of growing tensions between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology transfers. TikTok has significant traction among U.S. teens so this is indeed alarming for Facebook that usually squashes, acquires, clones or basically kills any competition. How do you squash the edits of Beijing though if you are Mark Zuckerberg and Sherly Sandberg? Learning Mandarin is not going to cut it.

Trump's somewhat "fake" trade agreement of phase one is so dumb it's incredible this is even happening as the stock market is stabilized again by false rhetoric. Trump's manipulation of Wall Street means we won't fall into a global recession for a few more months or years. China just plays along, because China knows it will win the long-game anyways.

 A division of Beijing-based ByteDance snapped up Musical.ly for close to $1 billion in late 2017, then in 2018 sunset the Musical.ly name and product. Instead, ByteDance integrated its two extremely similar apps under the TikTok name. TikTok has become the most viral app since Instagram since that merger.

That Facebook's COO would use the "democracy card" against TikTok is hilarious in that Facebook has been the most toxic new platform for democracy in the history of Silicon Valley, it's so twisted, it's beyond belief. Facebook as a dishonest company truly knows no limits.

TikTok did not seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly, they added, which gives the U.S. security panel scope to investigate it now. ByteDance is run like a startup, with a huge budget but without much experience in how the product of TikTok has scaled. They've been caught using children's data illegally as well.

“TikTok claims they don’t store American user data in China,” Senator Josh Hawley, chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism. But we all know Chinese tech companies must comply with its own Government, above all things. In a totalitarian state, Chinese companies will be weaponized against competitors and strategic rivals, that's a given.

As you can see, this story is way bigger than the acquisition of Musical.ly. ByteDance will become the next Facebook, and its war with Facebook is just getting started. Facebook has become a global utility of nearly 3 billion global users, if that's not a technology island nation, I don't know what is.

That ByteDance is the more innovative company however, there is little doubt in 2019. Facebook just has huge ad-revenues and a global monopoly the likes the world has never seen. The moral corruption of Google's direction is a preview of what we can expect from Facebook, as it attempts to pivot out into crypto, dating and social commerce.

Is TikTok a threat to America's national security? Yes and no, because it's much more than simply that. The rise of ByteDance is the chief signal of the decline of Silicon Valley, and Mark Zuckerberg will likely face the wrath of Beijing, one way or another.