Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 779 | TikTok Is Spying on You: Here’s Why It Matters | Guest: Kara Frederick

Episode Date: March 29, 2023

Today we're joined by Kara Frederick, director of the Tech Policy Center at the Heritage Foundation, to discuss Congress' recent TikTok hearings and the arguments for and against a nationwide TikTok ban. We discuss how much power China holds over TikTok as a company and what, ultimately, China could do with our data. We talk about how it's not just a concern when it comes to government data and why it's also dangerous for China to have YOUR specific data. We also look at a clip from the TikTok hearing in which TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew cannot deny that the CCP is manipulating content on the app. But does China manipulate TikTok algorithms to push ideologies that weaken the U.S., while restricting those very same ideologies in its own country? We explain why it's naive to think the answer is no. We also talk about the RESTRICT Act, a bill proposed to ban TikTok, and the opposition from both sides of the political aisle. --- Timecodes: (03:24) Interview begins (05:20) China taking TikTok data (09:25) Why should we care about TikTok on our personal phones? (15:09) What might China do with our data? (20:15) Does the CCP try to weaken the U.S. through TikTok? (25:18) RESTRICT Act & TikTok hearings (31:28) Opposition to the ban & AOC (39:40) Will the bill pass? (41:58) CEO of TikTok on CCP manipulation content on the app (47:25) TikTok's Project Texas (51:20) What can we do? --- Today's Sponsors: A'Del — go to adelnaturalcosmetics.com and enter promo code "ALLIE" for 25% off your first order! CrowdHealth — get your first 6 months for just $99/month. Use promo code 'ALLIE' when you sign up at JoinCrowdHealth.com. Quinn's Goat Soap — goat soap smells amazing and feels great on your skin, and cleans and moisturizes at the same time. Go to QPGoatSoap.com and use code “ALLIE” for 10% off the total order. --- Links: Heritage Foundation: "TikTok Generation: A CCP Official in Every Pocket" https://www.heritage.org/technology/report/tiktok-generation-ccp-official-every-pocket RESTRICT Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686 The Guardian: "US moves forward plan to ban TikTok as AOC joins protests supporting app" https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/mar/27/us-tiktok-ban-aoc-joins-protest --- Buy Allie's book, You're Not Enough (& That's Okay): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love: https://alliebethstuckey.com/book Relatable merchandise – use promo code 'ALLIE10' for a discount: https://shop.blazemedia.com/collections/allie-stuckey

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this

D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Congress and the Biden administration are considering banning TikTok. Is this really a good move? The bill that Congress has introduced to do so is being met with a lot of criticism from both sides of the aisle and yet TikTok still poses a threat to our privacy and national security. Breaking this all down for us, explaining it to us like we are five is Kara Frederick from the Heritage Foundation. My mind was blown during this conversation. I learned so much and you will too. This episode is brought to by our friends at Good Ranchers. Go to Good Ranchers.com. Use promo code All right, guys. Before we get into the conversation, I just want to encourage

if you haven't, go listen to yesterday's episode. We talked about everything that happened in Nashville. That story is developing. I might talk about some more of it tomorrow. I still want to get to the whole thing about Florida, allegedly banning books like the fascist of the 20th century and to debunk a lot of the narratives that you've heard about that. But after the Nashville tragedy happened, obviously that overtook yesterday's episode. And now I really wanted to get into what's happening in Congress with TikTok. So we will get to that. Eventually, there's always so much to cover. People always ask me, how do you find something to talk about every day? Do you ever run out of things to talk about? I'm like, oh my gosh, no, I never get to everything that I want to get to.

So just understand that if there's something that you think is important, that you wish I would talk about, I didn't get to. It's not because I don't want to or because I don't care. It's because I just don't have the time. You know, these episodes are supposed to be like 30 minutes and they're almost always over an hour because there's so much to say. There's so much to say. Also, just a reminder, we've got new merch. We've got awesome new merch. I was wearing my be a salmon sweatshirt yesterday. It just didn't feel right to point that out and encourage you to go buy it. But we've got lots and lots of cute new stuff that I absolutely love. A lot of my merch came in, which I'm so excited about. But now I'm like, well, I just need one of everything because I love it so much.

So go to Alliemerge.com. We'll link it in the description of this episode. You can use code Allie 10 for a 10% discount. Remember, guys, remember Mother's Day is coming up. Do not schedule golf that day. I'm just going to go ahead and tell you that's not what your wife wants. And if she tells you that she's fine with it, that's even worse. She is already fuming.

But to make it up to her, to make up for the fact that you already planned a golf trip on Mother's Day weekend, you should just get her a basket full of relatable gear. And regardless, you should be doing that anyway because that's exactly what she wants. So go to Alliemerge.com. Also, if you love this podcast, please leave us a five-star review wherever you listen. Just give us a brief explanation for why you love relatable, what it's meant to you. That means a lot to us. Okay, I think those are the only points of order that I have before we actually get into all

this TikTok stuff. So without further ado, here's our new friend, Kara Frederick. Kara, thanks so much for joining us. Before we get started, can you tell everyone who you are and what you do? Yeah, so my name is Kara Frederick, and I'm the director of tech policy at the Heritage Foundation. I would say the biggest, most influential conservative think tank that we have going in Washington, D.C. And if you guys don't know what a think tank is, it's effectively a research organization. So we're nonprofits that do a lot of studying, researching, and we try to figure out what are the

best policy recommendations for people on the Hill, for state legislatures to sort of enact what, frankly, the new conservatism should be propagating into the future. Yeah. You know, I mean, we can talk about the Heritage Foundation and how I think it's, I mean, it's always been conservative, but I actually think that the phase that it's in now and the kind of conservative, conservativeism that it is championing is really exciting and new. And right in line where I would like the right to go. very thankful for that. So we are talking specifically about what's going on with TikTok.

Now, we're hearing that the Biden administration, that people in Congress want to ban TikTok. So if that is the case, let's just start there. Would that mean that if Congress bans TikTok that no one would be able to download the app onto their phones? That's what it should mean. So right now we have a federal ban on government devices. So any federal, uh, federal employee, if they have a government device, that their device should not be able to access TikTok. And a ban would be on all devices. So it would effectively be prohibiting TikTok from operating within the U.S. market. What that would look like, there's degrees of gradation in terms of, you know, it's not going to wipe TikTok off your phone tomorrow, but there would be a process

in not effectively allowing Americans to access this app on their mobile operating systems. on their desktops. So their digital platforms in general. Okay. And why are we even talking about this? Because we remember Trump bringing this up a couple of years ago. We need to ban TikTok. Has something to do with the Chinese Communist Party. What exactly is going on? It's a little weird that the Biden administration would want to do something that Trump also wanted to do. Yeah, which is, I think, a testament to the gravity of the situation and the depth of the links to the Chinese Communist Party that this platform TikTok has. And I think the best way to explain it is TikTok is owned by a parent

company called Bite Dance. That company is headquartered in Beijing, and it is subject to the People's Republic of China's laws and policies. And foremost among this is a 2017 national intelligence law, which effectively compels, quote unquote, private companies headquartered in China to do government work. So if the state has a need, the state meaning the Chinese party state, the Chinese Communist Party has a need for, say, the data that TikTok collects or the data that ByteDance collects through TikTok, then ByteDance is effectively compelled to fork over that data. So every private entity in China has to abide by these laws and policies, and they all have to work together to achieve the ends of the PRC or the Chinese Communist Party.

Okay, gotcha. And is there evidence that this, that this is happening? Is there evidence that there is CCP interference within TikTok in a way that could damage the privacy of Americans and the security of the United States? Oh, there are, there are reams of evidence that point in this direction. I would say specifically in concrete ways, Bight Dance has a domestic suburb. subsidiary, which has three board seats. One of those board seats is a card carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party. We, the other researchers have figured out through LinkedIn that over 300

LinkedIn profiles of for ByteDams and TikTok employees say that they either currently or used to work for Chinese state media. And we know from leaked messaging docs, the PR strategy, as recently updated as 2021 for TikTok was to downplay a bite dance, downplay the China connection, and not focus on the fact that they are intertwined. And we also know there's an internal CCP apparatus within bite dance too that has influence over, you know, the direction the platforms take. And then, again, in terms of accessing data,

TikTok has maintained and equivocated and misrepresented for years that none of that U.S. data is not easily accessed by Chinese engineers or by employees in China. We know for a fact, given 80 leaked audio files from meetings, these are 80 meetings, that that's not true, that Chinese engineers have repeatedly accessed U.S. user data. And more and more information keeps coming out where Senator Hawley has a whistleblower with intimate knowledge of TikTok's operations that basically says anyone, employees in China can, switch between U.S. data and Chinese data like a light switch. So over and over and over again, TikTok's defense is, oh, this is all hypothetical, but everything they say is not happening is

actually happening. And afterwards, when they're called on it, it's mea coppa, mea copa. But yeah, we've got a confluence of evidence that pretty much says, yeah, the Chinese links are very, very deep here. And we'll try our best to downplay them. So I know this might sound like a crazy question, but I've heard this. I've heard this from friends. Why? Should we care? No, I care. I've never downloaded TikTok. I've never had TikTok on my phone.

I've never opened a TikTok video. This is even before CCP. I just didn't need anything else on my phone to distract me. But then, of course, this is an added reason. But some of my friends are like, why do I care if the CCP accesses my data? I already give all of my data to Apple, to Twitter, to Facebook, to all these places. You know, they would say, I live a boring life. I don't really care if they know where I live or what I'm doing or that I like these cooking videos or whatever.

What are they going to do to me? So what kind of data are you talking about? And why should the everyday user care of another government entity just happens to know what they're doing and where they are? Yeah, the short answer, it's the Chinese Communist Party, right? They're an adversarial nation and they frankly wish to do us harm. We know that. They've said that in public spaces. They've said repeatedly in the past few years that they're on a war footing.

especially with the United States of America. They aim to dominate us and become the dominant act around the stage. So that's one thing, you know, when the Chinese Communist Party can have direct access to your data, that's a massive problem. And then I hear this defense all the time. Okay, Facebook does this. Google does this. All American companies do this too. And yes, while there's a massive problem when it comes to privacy and data exploitation among these American companies,

I do think we need a national data protection framework to contend with that. it is much worse when the Chinese Communist Party can do it because right now they still have a much different system than we do. Again, I will admit that we are under pressure when it comes to an independent judiciary, a free press, and an engaged citizenry. We're definitely, that's a bulwark right now. It's, you know, slightly crumbling, I would say, but we still have that standing against what the Chinese system has and there's no debate. There's no adjudication of privacy whatsoever. what she says, what the party says, goes, and that's it. And, you know, they happen to be conducting a genocide in the Uyghur Autonomous Region or Xinjiang. So that's a problem too. So two things that have to do with China.

And then third, there's the data exploitation and collection issue. That is, I think it's much, it's different when it comes to the TikTok and other private companies because there have been studies that have been done by, you know, parties like a cybersecurity firm in Australia, which basically gave TikTok a score when they had their malware analysis tool, review some of the data exploitation and collections practices. It gave them one of the worst scores in industry. It said TikTok effectively exists as a data collection platform, and that's it. The only other app that got even close to what TikTok is doing with your data and how

it's collecting your data and how vulnerable your data. is given their systems is a Russian app called VEK. So that should give you pause. And then we know, and I can get into the technical details here, not sure your audience would be too interested in it, but I think we have to equip ourselves. It really matters when they are taking something like the unique device identifiers of your phone. Say, if you have an Android phone, you have something called a media access control address.

And that is very difficult to get rid of effectively, you know, or to disentangle yourself from. So TikTok was exploiting a loophole in Google's policies because Google's policy says, you shouldn't be able to do this. It's so exploitative. And yet, TikTok was exploiting a loophole that allowed them to hoover up those media's access control addresses,

and they tried to cover it up. And this is the Wall Street Journal reporting it. So over a 15-month period, they were collecting those unique device identifiers. And then when they were, you know, people started to make noise about it, they tried to cover it up. And then another, I don't know, Australia, because they're so proximate to the China threat,

they keep doing a lot of this research. They also found that every time you open TikTok, it would copy any content from your clipboard. So we store our passwords on our clipboard. We store banking information on our clipboard. TikTok was accessing it every time you open the device. That is very concerning and not common practice among industry standards. Hey, this is Steve Deast. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the big,

biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day Show right here on Blaze TV

or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. I think the point is that we don't exactly know what Beijing would do with all of this information, with all of this data. What we do know is that the intentions are not pure, of course. And they simply don't have the same views that we do on rights, on human rights, obviously on privacy, but when it comes to the First Amendment,

when it comes to human dignity, when it comes to the protection of human beings, I mean, they just don't believe the same things that we do. And if they do continue to rise to prominence as the world's global superpower, and they already have access to and are then in charge of all of our data, all of our information,

all of the most private parts of our lives, which a lot of us put on our phones, then we just don't know. We don't exactly know what the threat is, but literally everything that you hold dear, whether it's your assets, your money, photos of your children, passwords, credit card numbers,

if they have access to all of those things, like there really is no limitation to not just the power they will have over your life, but their ability to exploit that information. And I can't say I know exactly, what the tangible ramifications of that will be, but I know enough to say, it's not good. Yeah, you're exactly right. And I used to be an intelligence officer. So my job was to map the networks of our enemies, of our adversaries. We effectively looked for needles and haystacks.

If you are already giving them the information, they're not even going to have to look too hard to number one find you and number two exploit you. And, you know, we're both mothers. I have a daughter now. China is always playing the long game. So if they have that dossier on our children, who knows how subject to blackmail they can be going forward. I like to say that we're minting an Eric Swalwell with every person who uses TikTok over and over again. You're effectively in the clutches of the CCP if you use this app. And we also know that they've created dossiers on prominent American individuals, on prominent Australians like Natalie Imbrulia. Remember singer from the 90s. You probably don't. You're probably too young. But they have these profiles of

prominent individuals so they could, in their estimation, either spy on them or pull their strings if necessary. So we know that they create these, again, these digital profiles. And they've stolen so many data sets from American individuals in general, like with the Office of Personnel Management hack. When they stole, you know, social security numbers from government employees, There was a Marriott hack linked to the Chinese state, an Anthem healthcare hack linked to the Chinese state, a Equifax financial hack linked to the Chinese state. If they can integrate all of these datasets, use TikTok data to fill in the gaps, they've got us. 360-degree profiles, you name it, and we're in their pocket. So it really, really matters what they can do in the future, especially when it comes to artificial intelligence, which can aid them in this quest by parsing through large amounts of data to pull out.

patterns and identify anomalies and frankly look for people that they can be effective of targets of espionage and blackmail yeah and wow and think about if they have these digital profiles and digital dossiers and if they continue to kind of expand their authority and power over people in different in different countries like think about the things that the CCP stands against that maybe you represent or you might be for okay so they know if you're a Christian they know if you go to church just based on what you click on. They know if you're a conservative or if you're a progressive. And there's not any particular political ideology here in the United States. The CCP would say, yes, I'm for this or I'm for this. Really, they would be probably trying to figure out who is going

to be a problem. Like who is going to pose some kind of threat to us, some kind of opposition. And really, there are people on both sides of the political aisle and political spectrum here in the United States that they would probably see as representative of some kind of threat to CCP power. They're also very anti-LGBQ. They're anti-Muslim. They're anti-Christian. They're anti-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a people represent in the United States. So there's no one really that's off-limit to these digital dossieres that the Chinese could be collecting for whatever nefarious purposes to say, oh yeah, we don't like that that person's a Muslim. We don't like that person thinks they're trans. We don't like that person's a Christian. That person has to be collecting. That person has

many kids, who even knows, but they know all of these things about you, about your life, about your kids, probably where your kids go to school, what time you pick them up. And we are talking about the most powerful adversarial regime in the world. We, as I said, just don't know how that is going to affect us personally, individually, and then how that will affect us on a national scale. And another question I want to ask you is, because what's interesting about the CCP, and this is something they do a lot in different ways. We actually talked about this a couple weeks ago.

There was this like study that came out that said, oh, the conclusion stated, oh, kids with two moms or two dads actually fare better in a lot of ways than kids of a mom and a dad. And I looked into that and I was like, that's odd. And it actually, the data didn't even support the state of conclusion, but it was funded by an organization that takes its funding from the CCP. And what's interesting about that is that the same. CCP is very anti-LGBQ and we went through all of the different policies that they have restricting that kind of behavior and representation on social media. And so, and yet they kind of push that propaganda here, again, for whatever nefarious reasons. And it seems to me, and you can tell me, this is my question, it took me a long time to get to it.

But do you think it's possible that the CCP would be manipulating algorithms in order to push the kinds of values and ideologies that knows will make America weaker, make America less patriotic, make America, you know, less strong, whatever it is in a variety of ways, even while it restricts that kind of stuff in its own country, because they actually are very, very restrictive when it comes to children under the age of 18, even accessing TikTok. They can only access it, I believe, during certain times of the day. There are only certain kinds of videos that kids are allowed to watch. There is no LGBTQ content that is even allowed to be represented on social media in China. And yet, that's like all kids in the United States are seeing. They're getting sucked

into these rabbit holes of gender ideology, very often of sexual grooming that is not tolerated by the CCP. And I'm just wondering if the CCP has a hand in pushing the kind of algorithms and content that is destroying youth in the United States, even as they restrict it for their own people. Oh, it is 100% possible. And I think that you would be naive to think that it's not happening. And we know this because bite dance pushed divisive content during the 2022 midterm elections. They were mostly targeting or saying that, you know, we were supporting Democrats.

They were mostly saying Republicans were bad. They were, you know, fueling incendiary debates when it comes to things like abortion. We also know that Bytance pushed pro-CC narratives to a U.S. user base. There was a, they had a U.S. now defunct news app called Top Buzz that, or, yeah, top buzz that basically served a U.S. audience. And they put pro-China narratives on the top, basically. So we know that they're absolutely capable of doing this. Again, bite dance is in the clutches of the CCP. You have that one board member in their domestic subsidiary. You have all of those Chinese state media employees that are working there. So again, super naive to think that they're not pushing this on the American people whatsoever. And I think that's the biggest problem, the propaganda, the influence campaigns. You have a lot of, frankly, enterprising journalists who have read. registered on TikTok as an experiment as 13-year-olds, as 14-year-olds,

and they find themselves absolutely inundated within minutes with eating disorder content, self-harm content, suicidal content, all of the above. And this has happened again and again and again as these journalists are doing their own experiments because, like you said, a lot of, you know, certain outlets are paid for by the, by dance, by the CCP, by TikTok, and they're not going to do these studies. So people are taking matters into their own hands and actually conducting them and finding that there's a veritable onslaught of what you said of gender dysphoria content and all sorts of material that's deleterious to the health of our next generation, the mental health of our next generation, the actual health of our next generation, like with the TikTok ticks that pediatric hospitals are filled with now. Massive problem. You're naive if you don't think the CCP is, if not has a direct hand in this, then laugh.

about bite dance doing it in TikTok as well. Oh yeah. And I in case people don't know TikTok ticks, I don't know if we've actually talked about that, but it's it's basically young people who believe that they've developed, they like have Tourette's or they have some kind of issue that they can't stop doing. And it's actually not something that has developed organically in their mind or that they were born with. It's something that they have developed from watching it on TikTok. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. That is going to be studied for years to come. I mean, we could get into like parents, please, please, please, get your kids off TikTok. But maybe you won't have to because maybe we'll ban it. So let's talk about that. So all of this that we just explained is really just background to what is happening right now in Congress or what has been happening. So on March 7, 2023, U.S. Senator Mark Warner, a Democratic, from Virginia introduced a bill called the restricting the emergence of security threats that risk information and communications technology got to get it's it stands or restrict is what

it stands for all of that so I guess that's why it's so long they wanted to get to the word restrict so the restrict act the bill requires federal actions to identify and mitigate foreign threats to information and communications technology products and services this is bipartisan, you've got 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats. Last week, March 20th through 24th, the House Committee on U.S. Competition with China heard from TikTok CEO, Shuzi Chu, and other TikTok officials and advocates just asking about some of the things that we were just talking about. Okay, tell us a little bit about this bill. Do you think it's good? Because I'm hearing quite a bit of disagreement about this. You know, Ali, I think there are better bills.

It's not my favorite. I don't think, I think it's much too overreaching. I think it's much too vague, much too broad. I think it gives, and I know it gives authority to the Commerce Department, and you already have the header of the Commerce Department coming out and saying that if we ban TikTok, then we're going to lose every voter under 35 in the years to come. That's a massive problem when the person charged with effectively banning TikTok, which this bill doesn't even mention TikTok to let you know.

That's a big problem when she's thinking. of it from a political angle. And of course, she's a Biden administration employee. So she, you know, we do know that Biden likes to have a lot of his voters on TikTok. And they have a natural allergy, frankly, to what Trump tried to do, especially with his executive order to ban TikTok. So I think there are a lot of problems with that. I think there are really interesting proposals that do this one thing. And I'll get a little policy wonkish here if you're, if we'll let me when it comes to the specific authorities that Trump attempted to use to try to ban TikTok. And this was the Emergency or the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which basically

gives the president broad authorities to sanction, to look very and scrutinized and look very seriously at international transactions. And he attempted to apply these authorities, so sanctioning authorities effectively, to TikTok and WeChat another. Chinese own platform. And what happened was TikTok sued. And Biden came into office and, you know, took away his executive order to begin with. But when TikTok sued, they appeal to a specific amendment in what we call AIPA, that international economic emergency economic powers act again. And it's called, collectively known as the Berman Amendment, which has a carve out for informational materials. So when AIPA was updated, what Congress basically tried to do, this is in the 80s and 90s.

It was updated twice. They tried to say, okay, if there's an ostensibly hostile nation like Cuba and they want to send films and photographs to America, that shouldn't be sanctioned. So there should be an informational material loophole to these authorities. So TikTok relied on that. And a federal judge agreed with them when it came to stunting the implementation of Trump's EO. So no TikTok man because of this loophole. Now, some of these bills, they ask to amend this loophole and get rid of it.

So allow those AEPA authorities to be used. I'm more in favor of those bills because it gets out a specific part of the problem. And those bills name TikTok specifically for a ban. They're not trying to slow walk something. They're not trying to weasel out of it. So I think what Senator Rubio is trying to do, what Representative McCall is trying to do, what Representative Gallagher. And this is bipartisan, too.

For some of them, Democrat Christian-Morthy wants to work with Republican Representative Gallagher on this as well. So there are better, I think there are better alternatives out there that are going to get us to the place that we want to get, which is prohibiting TikTok from operating in the U.S. market. And we should, I think, lean more into those. There are some conservative and Democrat opponents to it. Now, there are more Democrats, I think, that are against banning in general, like AOC for. example, she actually created a TikTok account and posted her first TikTok video, which I think it's crazy that Congress people are even allowed to have a TikTok. I mean, based on everything that you just said, I feel like that should just be an easy one. That if you are a public official,

especially on the federal level, you should not be, we already know that TikTok is not allowed on federal devices, right? And so it's crazy that she just doesn't care about that at all. She doesn't care about that at all. So she said in her little video, which I'm so shocked that she has not had TikTok up until this point. She said, do I believe TikTok should be banned? No, the United States has never before banned a social media company from existence. I don't see why that matters at all. There's no social media company that we know that has gone to this extent to exploit American data from operating in our borders. And this is an app that has over 150 million Americans on it. Again, irrelevant to me. That's even actually more scary or scarier. major social media companies are allowed to collect troves of deeply personal data about you, and you don't know about that you don't know about with any really significant regulation whatsoever. The United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that has no significant data or privacy protection laws on the books. It just doesn't feel right to me. Okay, I want to know, one is that true?

And you kind of did already address this argument at the beginning. But like, what would you say? If I'm AOC, like, how would you respond? to that. Number one, I'd say, what device are you using in Congress to do this? Because now you've opened up what Wi-Fi are you connecting to. Now you've opened up your compatriots and other U.S. officials to exploitation by the Chinese Communist Party. So that's a big thing. But the data vulnerability and exploitation issues that she just broke wide open for her colleagues. Because if you connect to Wi-Fi, it does open up by being on the same network if you have TikTok downloaded on your

phone and it connects to that Wi-Fi, you've potentially opened up other devices connected to the Wi-Fi to exploitation by TikTok and frankly by Tansson and thus the CCP. So that's one. Number two, I think, you know, these are TikTok talking points. These are straight from TikTok lobbyists that they paid over $5 million in 2022 to stripes around the hall sort of parroting. So they got to her. That's sad.

And thirdly, I will concede that they're a national data protection framework. We've advocated for it at the Heritage Foundation since February 2022. I do think there are privacy considerations that are going to help, but they're not going to solve the TikTok problem whatsoever. So we need it layered on top of a TikTok ban, and that'll be useful because there is one data point that I think your audience should know, is that U.S. user data can be sold to TikTok. So even if there's a TikTok ban,

TikTok and by dance, Busta CCP can get the information from, third parties from other companies as well, just based off of the fact that, you know, there are trackers, there are software development kits that takes your data and sends it to other companies and whatnot. So to confront, I think, that data collection and sharing, that's massive. And we should do it for the United States. I think everyone who is on these platforms deserves to understand clearly how their information is collected, stored, and shared. And that's just baseline. So sure, AOC, we can agree on that. But when it comes to TikTok, you know, just that data privacy framework, that's not going to do anything for the TikTok problem

in general. And TikTok knows that. So, yeah, I think he's parroting TikTok lobby's talking points. Yeah. Right. And Ilhan Omar, she said something similar. She was like, we shouldn't ban an entire social media platform. They don't give any good, they don't give any good reason, which isn't exactly surprising. It's not like I've ever been stunned by the logical capabilities of AOC. and like she knows her audience. They're not looking for that. And I think that really the reason is is because they understand that they have been buoyed by the support of a lot of young people who consider themselves socialist.

And a lot of their young people, I mean, a lot of their young people, one, are on TikTok, but I think they might understand. And I don't want to give them too much credit, but much of the progressive ideology that allows them to have the power that they do is being pushed on TikTok. it really helps them support their narratives, support their ideology. I think also young people that are distracted whose minds are basically atrophying from overuse of social media tend to vote. I'm sorry, but tend to vote for people like AOC because they don't really think through

things. They don't really think through why social isn't bad. So I understand why she would, just for her own personal gain, want to keep TikTok around. so that makes sense. Tucker Carlson, I thought this was interesting. He is talking about the restrict act. Now, from what I understand, from what I've seen of Tucker Carlson, he would probably be on the side of restricting TikTok, but specific to this bill, he says, this bill isn't really about banning TikTok. It's never about what they say it is. Instead, this bill would give enormous and terrifying new powers to the federal government to punish American citizens and regulate how they

communicate with one another. For example, the bill would regulate certain transactions between persons in the United States and foreign adversaries. Now, what's a foreign adversary and who gets to decide? Well, the Secretary of Commerce and the Director of National Intelligence, not Congress, get to decide what foreign adversaries are. Well, that ought to trip a switch in your brain. And then the transactions with foreign adversaries would include any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in or use of any information and communications,

technology, product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software, States repairs or the provision of data hosting services. Well, that's pretty broad. So he thinks, ironically, that this bill is big brother. Yeah. So, again, we've talked about it and we've, you know, put out public material where we do think this bill is very broad and very vague. And I'm myself, you know, having worked in national security, my entire career, you know, I looked at, I was a counterterrorism analyst. I looked at foreign Islamic terrorism. And I'm very concerned. And I'm very concerned about the definition inflation of, you know, frankly, domestic extremist, terrorism,

extremism, national security. So we don't want to give the government any more power, especially this Biden administration, which we've seen when it comes to school board meetings and, you know, the FBI tagging parents who objected to CRT being taught in their classrooms as potential domestic terrorists. You have a February bulletin from the Department of Homeland Security, that said spreading misinformation, malinformation or disinformation about COVID was tantamount to terrorist activity. So I am very, very concerned about using the national security apparatus, which has, you know, definitions and words that are used very deliberately because they are able to designate specific authorities to those words, hence the invocation of terrorism when it comes to these things.

That comes, that resources come with that. And, again, authorities come with that. So I'm very concerned about that. I think the American people are right to be concerned about that as well. Yeah. So as you said earlier, there are better options. You believe that TikTok should be banned. It should be restricted, but not in a way that gives the U.S. government who, quite frankly, we also don't trust, not in the same way that we don't trust the CCP, but we don't want any government entities spying on us and regulating us and our interactions and our commerce in that way. And so this bill is not it. This Restrict Act is not it.

And yet there are Republicans signing on to it. Do you think it's going to pass? You know, I think it does have that groundswell of bipartisan support. Joe Biden has, you know, thrown his weight behind it. But what I also think is interesting, as we point out in our heritage publications, through certain media outlets that TikTok is pretty happy about this bill, too. So I think that's worrisome to begin with when if it's supposed to be a TikTok ban and TikTok likes it, I would be scratching my head. You know, I don't know.

Given Showchew's the TikTok CEO's testimony in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, you know, I don't think he did a great job. So I do think that there's still momentum when it comes to a potential TikTok ban. You know, I think there's going to be another TikTok. So whatever bill goes forward, you have to think about sort of the next TikTok, the next Chinese entity that is emerging in the U.S. marketplace. So frankly, you know, again, I'm an analyst, but I can't necessarily give predictions in terms of, but I do think there's a growing momentum for a TikTok ban. And I think a TikTok ban is a good thing. Yeah. No, I agree with you.

I think it's going to face a TikTok ban, obviously. It's going to face a lot of opposition. There are people who make a lot of money from TikTok. you know, influencers, people who don't have any malintent or people who get recipes from it and, you know, things like that. People have just kind of come to enjoy it as an app. And that's part of why it's so effective. Like, we wouldn't be talking about it if it didn't have algorithms that are addicting and that make people want to continue to log on to it. We wouldn't be talking about it if it wasn't so popular. So that means it's going to be tough, I think,

for some of these representatives, for some of these people in Congress to get behind any bill, no matter how common sense it is that bans TikTok because a lot of the young constituents will be mad. Now, I, it's easy for me to say because I don't have to be elected. I'm like, I don't care. They don't know what's good for them. Of course. They're addicted to it. It doesn't matter. It compromises our national security and also your personal privacy. Like, I'm sorry, 15 year old. Your brain is not even developed. We're going to make this decision for you. So, I mean, that's where I'm I stand. But of course, like you said, I also worry about a bill like this that the government would

just use to give themselves more power to exploit our data. So I meant to play this earlier, you mentioned the CEO of TikTok. And just to give the people an example of why you said he didn't do a good job and why he actually made us in Congress more frightened about what TikTok is doing, here's an interaction between Representative Flueger, who is from the state of Texas, and he is asking and I'm going to ask you a little bit about what he actually means by this. He's asking about data manipulation, and here's what the CEO of TikTok had to say about that. Do you disagree with FBI director Ray and NSA director Nekisone

when they said that the CCP could have the capability to manipulate data and send it to the United States? Do you disagree with their statement? Their statement says could. So do you disagree with that? No, I don't disagree with that. Okay, so it is possible that the CCP, under the auspices of Bight Dance, which is your parent company, which you get paid from,

has the ability to manipulate content that is being shared with 130 million Americans, yes? Okay, so he just goes on basically saying the same thing that he tried to use as an answer at the beginning of that clip. But tell, like, what does that, what does that exactly mean? Yeah, so this is really interesting. And director Ray came out a few years ago. he was giving an address to a college, and he basically said that bite dance, so the Chinese Communist Party controls bite dance, and bite dance has the ability to control the recommendation

algorithm. And I think, you know, that is something information we're not privy to without our TSSCI clearances yet, but when you have Director A definitively coming out and saying that bite dance and thus the Chinese Communist Party has the ability to control the recommendation algorithm, that's a problem. And I think the most telling corroboration of that is in 2020, when Trump was issuing that initial executive order to potentially

ban TikTok, what China Chinese representatives through Bytance, what they came out and said was that China will never sell the source code for TikTok. So China, and we know that Chinese government officials have instituted export controls that cover AI and algorithms.

So if China doesn't want to get rid of the algorithm behind TikTok, why? Do they just want it because it's powerful and it's good and they just want to tinker on it for fun to make more money? Or because they can directly control it like Christopher Ray said in some of those speeches. And he said it multiple times. So I think that is very, very interesting. And again, you look at TikTok executives and officials' history of misrepresentation. What they have said is Chinese engineers don't access US user data. That was a lie. That was disproven. What they have said is there are big firewalls between U.S. user data and, again, those Chinese employees, that was a lie.

And we know that from leaked audio. We also know that they, BightDance approved this, they attempted to use TikTok to surveil the physical locations of U.S. journalists. That was reported. That was proven as well. So everything that TikTok and BightDance effectively says later falls to the truth. And then they say, oh, yeah, sorry, well, that doesn't happen again. or we fired those guys, so everything's fine now. So in my mind, okay, the algorithm is, that's a big, big question.

And there's a pattern of behavior. Let's go with a pattern of behavior. When people show you who they are, believe them. And tell us, he also talks about later in this clip, which we didn't play, Representative Flueger says, please rename your project. And he's talking about the Texas project that TikTok has. What is that? Yeah, so that was, I alluded to that firewall.

that TikTok has basically promised to the American people where they say, we are going to protect your data. And we're going to do that through Project Texas. And what Project Texas does is they say it is a wrecked that firewall. It makes it much more difficult in their words for Chinese employees, Bightance employees, to access U.S. user data. They say they're going to store the U.S. user data in the U.S. before they've, we know from reporting that they, at least for a period of

of time actually did store it in China prior to 2019. And again, they misrepresented that until that was reported out in the open. And now they store it in the U.S. in Singapore. Again, it doesn't necessarily matter where you store the data if Chinese employees can access that data if it's stored here, if it's stored in Singapore. So they say, we're just going to store it in the U.S. But again, doesn't necessarily matter where the data is stored. That is a red herring because we know the systems can access the data. And frankly, the Chinese Communist Party has a lot of leverage over human beings with access to the data, too. So they can frankly lean on your grandma back in China in the homeland. And if you have an engineer who's working here for TikTok, and they

want to give up information. So there are big holes in Project Texas. They also say we have third party oversight, U.S. company oversight, Sipheus, which is the big investigation that dragged on for two years about the national security issues run by again. the Commerce Department. So I think Janet Yellen was actually at the helm of she's the chair of Sipheus. So this is the committee on foreign investment in the U.S. And they say, okay, they're going to have oversight over U.S. data too. But again, we can't believe anything that TikTok says, given their history of misrepresentation.

And the fact that there are some technical issues with saying that Project Texas is going to solve all the problems. Yeah. Wow. So interesting. Are you pleasantly surprised that the Biden administration, at least ostensibly, is interested in banning TikTok? I am, if in fact, they are interested in banning TikTok. So given the fact that they sort of, again, revoked Trump's initial executive order and put in place a framework that they really haven't seemed to implement yet, that's sort of a knock against them. I think something in their favor is, yes, they've actually talked about this in a serious way.

I do think there are, you know, people within the administration who are still working hard, they recognize that this is an actual problem, and then it's a bipartisan problem at that. So that is encouraging. But whether or not they get this over the finish line, I'm worried that now they're starting to sort of pull back and realize with their leftist constituency among, you know, young people, this could be a problem. I'm worried that those ideas might win the day. But yeah, if we can keep going, if people on the Democratic side like Senator Mark Warner can continue to raise the alarm about these issues, then I think that's a good thing. Yeah, I think so too. I would also be surprised if he actually pushes this over the finish line, just some of the things that he has done that showed such a capitulation to China, such a weakness toward China, ending a lot of Trump era protections.

I mean, it's hard for me to believe that he would potentially sacrifice the votes of young people, which I mean, realistically, he wouldn't. Those young people who are on the left are going to vote for the Democrat anyway, but he probably doesn't want to anger them. So like you said, I would be surprised too. But we can hope and hope that at least eventually, these things don't happen overnight, but at least eventually someone can push it over the finish line. Thank you so much. You explained all of this so well. there's a lot of other things, I'm sure, that you could get into for us. But I think that this gives people a really good understanding of what's going on.

Is there anything else that you want people to know? Is there anything that people can do if they care about this? Yeah, I think you need to get it off your phones. And, you know, sadly, given the fact that it exploits those unique device identifiers, deleting it off your phone may not, you know, China has data points on you now. They have metadata from you now. So it's not going to stop. the problem, but the least you can do is start. And then if your friends or, you know,

all influencers are all over TikTok, I mean, in my mind, they got to take one for the team. They have to understand that this is bigger than them. This is bigger than their ability to, you know, buy another bag or something like that, that their TikTok income is giving them. And they're being actively manipulated by a hostile power. And that should give anyone pause. Yeah, definitely. get your kids especially your teens off tic-tok even if cp weren't a part of this man it's such a toxic toxic place um thank you so much for taking the time to come on i really appreciate it uh are you on twitter instagram not tictock yeah unfortunately well i mean you know uh competitive platforms that's what we're all about at heritage competition so i'm on twitter as kara a frederick uh like frederick the great um and on instagram as kara fredd with two D's. Okay, awesome. Thank you so much, care. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Alba. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we

believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show, for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us.