American Thought Leaders - The Truth About TikTok: FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr

Episode Date: March 13, 2024

“Right when TikTok was negotiating a national security agreement with U.S. officials, a Beijing-based team surveilled the location of journalists who’ve been writing negative stories about TikTok. And the evidence at this point of their real national security threat is very clear.”Brendan Carr serves as the senior Republican commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission. He has testified before Congress about the unique national security threat to America posed by the video-hosting service TikTok.“Any entity that is inside of China, particularly if they’re a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] member, is compelled by a national security law in China to do the bidding of the CCP surveillance apparatus—and to keep it secret,” says Mr. Carr.He argues that new legislation in the House of Representatives would force the decoupling of TikTok from its Chinese parent.“[Americans] have a right to exchange information on that platform. But there is no constitutional protection that requires the government to let a national security threat like TikTok persist,” says Mr. Carr.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to American Thought Leaders Now. I'm Jan Jekielek. Today, our very special guest is FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr. Brendan, so good to have you. Yeah, great to be back with you. Thanks so much. often portrayed as a privacy issue, as an issue of free speech, but it's actually much more than that. And you've laid it out incredibly in this recent Newsmax op-ed. I want to go through the whole picture with you. So start me off here. Yeah, thanks so much. A lot of people look at TikTok and they think it's just another fun application for sharing dance videos. And the reality is that TikTok collects a tremendous amount of sensitive data on now millions of Americans. It's search and browsing history, keystroke patterns, biometrics, location information. And for years, TikTok officials represented to U.S. lawmakers that none of that data,

or essentially none of that data, made its way back inside China. And then lo and behold, in 2022, a blockbuster story broke open that got leaked internal tick-tock communications that showed no in fact quote everything is seen inside of China and they now have a track record of espionage and foreign influence that is deeply deeply concerning from a national security perspective for instance right when tick-tock was negotiating a national security perspective. For instance, right when TikTok was negotiating a national security agreement with U.S. officials, a Beijing-based team surveilled the location of journalists who've been writing negative stories about TikTok. And the evidence at this point of their real national security threat is very clear. You know, this is another point that's very interesting. This is actually, I might add, by law. There's this 2017 national security law.

Maybe just kind of explain that to me, how that fits into the picture. Yeah, at the end of the day, any entity that is inside of China, particularly if they're a CCP member, is compelled by a national security law in China to do the bidding of the CCP surveillance apparatus and to keep it secret. And so what TikTok always says is kind of interesting. You've and to keep it secret. And so what TikTok always says is kind of interesting. You got to parse their words. They say, well, none of this data is stuff that we have shared with the government of China, but they don't have to share it with the government of

China. What they do is they make it available to TikTok and ByteDance employees that are in Beijing that are themselves members of the CCP. And so it's really concerning from that perspective. And again, the two core issues with TikTok are espionage and foreign influence. And we've seen both repeatedly. And you asked about free speech, and this is a really important issue that I wanted to get into.

The Supreme Court has been very clear that it draws a distinction between regulations based on content of speech versus regulation based on content of speech versus regulation based on an entity's conduct. In fact, there's a Supreme Court case that's directly on point called Arcara Books. An entity was running a bookstore. They had illegal conduct taking place in the bookstore. In that case, it was running a prostitution ring. The government stepped in, shut down the bookstore. The bookstore owner said that you couldn't do that because

buying and selling of books is protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court turned it aside. They said it has nothing to do with the buying and selling books. It has to do with the fact that your conduct was a national security threat. It's the same with TikTok. People have a right, Americans, to exchange information on that platform. But there is no constitutional protection that requires the government to let a national security threat like TikTok persist. You know, we looked at this Missouri versus Biden case that's actually now it's called

Murphy versus Missouri at the Supreme Court. We see our government, the U.S. government, ostensibly colluding with these various companies, social media giants to censor Americans and, you know, actually kind of turn up the dial and down the dial on various types of viewpoints. So obviously, TikTok has the same capability. I haven't seen documents specifically around that in these cases. That exists. So people say, well, this is an issue that's just the same across all of these different types of companies. It's a really good point. I've been really active in speaking out on the abuses by big tech companies, whether they're based here in Silicon Valley or in Beijing. I've pushed for Section 230 reform. I've pushed for regulations that would make sure they're not

discriminating based on viewpoint. As you indicated, this litigation shows that there has been some collusion effectively between the Biden administration and Silicon Valley to censor the free speech rights of Americans. And that's led a lot of people to question, well, is TikTok really any different than those big social media companies? And it is, definitively so. Just look at the track record. The TikTok has, in their leadership in ByteDance, a CCP cell embedded right there. There is hundreds of pages of documents that walk through all of the controls that the CCP has in place to control TikTok. If you look at the algorithm and you

compare the output of that algorithm to the output of any other regular social media company, whether it's Google's or Facebook, Instagram, it shows that the content on TikTok is uniquely aligned with that of the CCP. And again, you have all this evidence of CCP officials themselves gaining access to U.S. user data. You've had studies that have gone through and look at the source code and found things that are deeply concerning about TikTok from a security issue that aren't present in other applications. So when you can go down the line, there's eight or nine or 10 different reasons why TikTok is different. Not one of those applies to social media companies, let alone all of them. So as a country, do we need to do a better job

with reining in big tech companies? Absolutely. But the threat presented with TikTok is different and requires a different solution. And this legislation that Congress is considering the House might pass this week is very targeted. It only goes after an application if it is controlled by a foreign adversary, which is just China, North Korea, Iran or Russia. And then only if it presents a real national security threat. And then only again if that threat is disclosed publicly in the case made. So this action in the House on TikTok, which would require to simply break ties with the CCP, it can continue to do business here, it doesn't require it to go to a U.S. company or a Silicon Valley company. Well, but the question is, how could that possibly be accomplished, right, given the realities of functioning as a company that's in China or beholden to China, given the national security law, given the doctrine of civil-military fusion, frankly, which is one of the top priorities, according to Xi Jinping of the CCP, the seven top priorities.

I mean, it would be unthinkable, at least in my view, for that relationship to not function. Like people, heads would roll, so to speak, maybe even literally. Yeah, I mean, some people, for instance, have argued similar to that. Should we just put in place better baseline privacy or data flow laws to stop the data from flowing back to China, not just for TikTok, but for other companies?

But again, we've actually tried that with TikTok. TikTok, when they were caught red-handed sending US user data back to Beijing, they said, okay, you caught us. We're going to wall off sensitive U.S. user data from Beijing. Wall Street Journal report came out and found, in fact, they hadn't done that. Why? Are the TikTok U.S. officials just bad people? No. The reason is because they are ultimately controlled and beholden by the CCP. There's nothing that TikTok can do that will stop those data flows from going back to China. That's why this bill in the House is so smart, because it's a structural remedy.

It requires them to divest from their ties to the CCP. And we have experience doing this. For instance, there was an application called Grindr that the Treasury Department took action on and required them to divest their ownership back into China. So the practical implementation is actually less of a challenge than getting the political consensus that, yes, we need to take action on TikTok. So, you know, a huge issue, really, like even bigger than the data privacy issue and the basically, you know, use of this data and the espionage issue, right, to me is the influence issue. TikTok ran this campaign that basically says, you know, the U.S.

wants to ban TikTok, stop it, and which resulted in, I don't know how many phone calls, but from what I hear from various congressional offices, a lot. And of course, this legislation, as you outlined very well, isn't talking about a TikTok ban. It's talking about a divestment, right, right, which is foundationally different. But please expand on this for me. I think there's two main, but probably a third big issue. We talked about espionage, which is the data flows. The second issue is foreign influence that you talked about. And we have evidence of it, not just these recent phone calls that you mentioned, but before our most recent midterm election in 2022, CCP state media stood up TikTok accounts without, unlike other social media,

disclosing that they were CCP state media accounts and used those to target select U.S. politicians for criticism. So we know there's a track record there of gauging in foreign influence operations. And then the third bucket has to do with mental health. There's some fairly uniquely concerning things about the way the TikTok algorithm works. I think most parents assume that TikTok works like Facebook, which is, you know, it's your friends or your friend's friends. That's not how TikTok works at all. As soon as you go on there, there was a study that the New York Times cited that showed that accounts set up for young girls, 13-year-old girls, were showing them self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of

the accounts being set up. That's very different than what happens in China. The version of TikTok that's available in China called Douyan, it shows kids their educational material, museum exhibits, science experiments. So it's a very different content from a foreign influence perspective. And there's time limits even from what I understand as well on Duyen, right? Yeah, exactly. They have a lot of limits. Now look, again, in this country, should we do a better job with sort of online safety for kids? Yes. And there's legislation in Congress that would do it. But none of those actions that we want to take with respect to big tech companies will work with TikTok until you break that link to the CCP. Once you do that,

then yes, we can come in with online child protections, additional laws. Yes, we can come in over the top with privacy laws, but unless you deal fundamentally with the national security threat, nothing else matters. Because again, privacy laws and national security laws are designed to solve entirely separate problems. Europe actually has the world's toughest privacy and data flow regulations. And if those were enough to solve the issue with TikTok, they wouldn't need it to have gone to the additional step, which they did, which was banning TikTok on official EU devices. It's just further evidence that national security steps and privacy steps are designed to solve different problems. So we need to do both. And TikTok and

getting this legislation across the finish line in the House this week would be a really significant win for national security. TikTok collects a lot more than even the typical social media, which is known to be incredibly invasive. And I'm thinking about, you know, you're doing a video of yourself. You can see the books behind you. You can see, you know, certain items that are around. There's all this material there that's available. And we also know that communist China is very interested in consuming massive amounts of data to build its AIs and so forth, and also to specifically target America. So there's that element. Why is Facebook one of the most effective marketing tools out there? Because it has

all these incredible amounts of data as these profiles. Now, TikTok is taking that whole thing to another level. So that targeting of the messaging or targeting of various videos like the type self-harm video or something like that can be very specific. For example, if there's people that are unstable in a particular way, could very easily across tens of millions of accounts could send out more destabilizing content that would drive those people to do things that they wouldn't normally do. Right. Okay. So I'm just kind of portraying a scenario. So the espionage side is actually deeply connected to the ability to influence side. Yeah, you're right. In fact, there was a story, I believe it was a Forbes story that again, got internal TikTok, either interviews or information.

And they disclosed that TikTok has a tool that the employee described as NSA to go that enables it to build a digital dossier on individuals. And again, it's the ability of combining that granular detailed information on an individual coupled with it being used for 150 million Americans. You're both getting granular data in a very, very clear perspective from a psychological perspective on millions of Americans. And again, I have deep concerns, and I've received my fair share of slings and arrows for pushing back on U.S. technology companies. But there is something fundamentally different about the way TikTok operates. How is that severing going to work in this legislation

of that tie with the CCP? How can you guarantee that? It ends up being fairly straightforward, which is to say the divestment away from ByteDance. And again, any company or entity or person that isn't themselves beholden to China or Iran or Russia or North Korea can step in and TikTok can continue to operate. So the millions of Americans that love TikTok today, they can keep using it, but just simply in a way that is far more secure from their own personal perspective, but also from America's national security. So they would have a number of months under this legislation to perfect or to realize that divestment of the CCP ties? The CCP has an incredible arsenal of weapons against America first

and, frankly, Western democracies in general, which it views as its primary threat to its existence. I can't imagine a scenario where they would possibly let this happen. Why? Because they would essentially be giving their number one weapon, or let's say, you know, in their top five or something like that, to America. Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, would the CCP allow TikTok to have the ties broken back to communist China? If you listen to the CCP, what they say is, you know, TikTok is independent company. The decisions are made by the investors that invest in ByteDance.

If they're right, then the divestment will be easy. If the CCP is wrong, if in fact they have been using it, as we know they have, for surveillance and for foreign influence, then the divestment will be slightly more difficult from their perspective, but also, I think, very, very telling ultimately. My prediction would be that this will be one of the biggest legal and messaging fights that we've seen. And we've seen quite a few. Yeah, I think this is really good on the law.

Again, the particular bill here that's been drafted, there's been a lot of different bills out there. And so there's some confusion about what does this particular bill do? Because there's other bills that were broader and more sweeping. This one's really narrow and targeted. As I walk through, it doesn't present, in my view, any First Amendment issue under Supreme Court precedent. It's a clear win, I think. And so Speaker Johnson has been really good on this bill. Conference Chair Elise Stefanik has been great. And it's bipartisan at the end of the day. Chairman of the China Select Committee, Gallagher, as well as his Democrat counterpart, Krishnamoorthy. So there's

a big, big tent that's together on this. And we're on the cusp right now of one of probably the most significant legislative steps that I can think of, obviously, particularly in not just national security, but a fast moving space like technology. TikTok isn't the beginning. There is a process that's been in place already. That process is how we identified Huawei as spy gear, ZTE. It's how we took action at the FCC on China Mobile and China Telecom. So TikTok is simply the next application that has run through the process.

And it's again, not enough that it has ties back to China, but there's these plus factors of concrete, demonstrated threats to national security. It's the right step for us to take here. And as a final thought, I think the China Daily editor has weighed in on this as well, the mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, obviously on the side of, you can't ban TikTok, that would be a free speech issue, kind of a strange entry into the discussion, I think might offer some hints.

Yeah, that's interesting from that perspective, but also the concept of reciprocity. Some people have said, if we do this, will there be a response? I think they forget that Facebook and Twitter and all these U.S. technology companies are already banned in China. Even TikTok itself isn't allowed in China. So, the arguments that this would open up some sort of reciprocity considerations is misplaced, because China has unilaterally, for trade and protectionist reasons, blocked U.S. companies. The U.S. is acting based on legitimate national security concerns. Well, Commissioner Brendan Carr, such a pleasure to have you on, and we'll have you back soon. Yeah, glad to do it. Thanks so much.