Taiwan Gets Tough On Chinese Disinformation Ahead Of Elections

By EMILY FENG

Demonstrators protest against what they called "red media" influence in Taiwan during a rally against pro-China media in front of the president's office building in Taipei on June 23. With a presidential election in January, Taiwan is bracing for a new deluge of disinformation, much of it aimed at boosting Beijing's preferred politicians.

Eye Central Television is a popular satirical TV news show in Taiwan, with an active social media presence. 

One day in April, it received a Facebook message from someone using the name Tina Hsu, but this was no ordinary fan.
Hsu's Facebook profile was blank; it had just been created that morning.
And Hsu made a surprising proposition: to buy EyeCTV's Facebook admin rights, taking control of the content shared with its more than 420,000 followers.
At first, the political satire program, reminiscent of The Daily Show, played along. 

"We jokingly asked for 1.4 billion Taiwan dollars [$46 million]," says show writer Sandra Ho — requesting a number that matches the population of China, she notes.
EyeCTV didn't sell out in the end. 

Many in the Taiwanese media suspect the proposition and others like it are part of a Chinese state-backed influence campaign. 

Dozens of Facebook pages in Taiwan have become content mills for Chinese Communist Party propaganda. 

Taiwan is now the liberal democracy that receives the most disinformation spread by a foreign government, according to a May report from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.
The stakes for curbing the propaganda are especially high right now in Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing says belongs to the People's Republic of China. 

In January, Taiwan will vote for its president and legislators. 

Its current leaders are determined to avoid a repeat of the 2018 local elections, which were marred by Chinese interference.
But to filter false content, Taiwan faces free speech concerns that other countries, such as the United States, also have encountered.

Fact-checking Facebook
One of the latest efforts against disinformation is a unique collaboration between Facebook and the Taiwan FactCheck Center. 

The nonprofit center uses a back-end tool provided by Facebook to track viral, misleading posts and works to fact-check them. 

Once it does, Facebook alerts anyone who shared the post that it was wrong and includes a link to the fact-check article below the false post.
"Journalists focus on the truth, on describing something that happened. But for us, we want to prove that something has not happened. 

That's much harder to do," says Summer Chen, the editor-in-chief of the Taiwan FactCheck Center.
The initiative comes as the government is getting tough on disinformation, including steep fines for those caught spreading it.

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Joseph Wu speaks during a news conference in Taipei on Nov. 22.

"It's not only a domestic effort or a [Taiwanese] government interagency effort. There's also an international effort" to ward off Beijing's influence campaigns, Joseph Wu, Taiwan's foreign minister, tells NPR. 

"Because of the experiences we have, we have also built up some of the most formidable defense capabilities in the world."
In April, Taiwan's broadcast regulator fined a TV station over $32,000 for not verifying an inaccurate news item before airing it. 

Dozens of individuals have also been fined for sharing harmful, false items on social media.
The crackdown comes amid rising suspicion of mainland Chinese influence in Taiwan's news media.
In June, thousands marched against what protest organizers called the "threats of infiltration" by Chinese Communist "red media" in Taiwan's democracy. 

Later that month, Taiwan refused entry of a TV journalist from the mainland who broadcast misleading reports. 

Regulators are currently discussing blocking video-streaming sites run by Chinese companies Baidu and Tencent from broadcasting in Taiwan.

No name, no location
There's a central challenge for regulators: Most disinformation coming into Taiwan is through anonymous, hard to detect social media accounts.
Last year, when Taiwanese officials were falsely accused of abandoning Taiwanese tourists stranded by Typhoon Jebi in Osaka, Japan, the story was first spread by an anonymous user on PTT, a messaging forum popular in Taiwan. 

Within a day, several Taiwanese evening talk shows had picked up the item. 

Furious residents heaped criticism on the Taiwanese government's representative in Osaka, Su Chii-cheng.
He killed himself soon after, reportedly leaving a note that said he had been troubled by the news.
Researchers say some of the misleading material, including a doctored image, shows signs of being created in mainland China.
Tracing influence campaigns back to Beijing is difficult though, says Audrey Tang, Taiwan's digital minister. 

Social media users and hackers can use software to conceal their location.
One giveaway on Twitter, Tang says, is when users in mainland China are able to access the site, normally blocked by China's Internet firewall, without help from such software.

Using Taiwanese slang
Puma Shen runs DoubleThink Labs, a research outfit monitoring how false information travels from content farms funded by Chinese state or party-run entities to Facebook fan pages to news shows in Taiwan, and broadcast to an unsuspecting public.
Shen says one tactic he sees is an online "subliminal attack" to sway voters. 

Hundreds of hackers search one candidate's name over and over again to slant search engine algorithms toward displaying their results more prominently than other candidates'.
One day, Shen predicts China will surpass Russia in global disinformation operations.
"It's not really hard to do that," Shen says, pointing to Chinese-run apps like short video platform TikTok, now under U.S. investigation for collecting American user data, and messaging app WeChat. 

"[China] has all these marketing groups' online shopping apps which can easily collect private information on citizens in other countries."
China's influence efforts have advanced rapidly since the last Taiwanese municipal elections in 2018. Some messages stood out because they used mainland Chinese text, written in a simplified alphabet, in contrast with the traditional characters used in Taiwan, researchers say. 

Now, disinformation posts written in fluent Taiwanese slang are shared through private social media channels rather than publicly.

Rights concerns
Cédric Alviani, the head of Reporters Without Borders' East Asia bureau in Taipei, warns that coercive measures against media, including fining news outlets, are counterproductive: "By doing this kind of thing, the Taiwanese authorities are actually doing the exact same thing as they criticize," he says. 

He's referring to how Taiwan is using top-down methods to control undesirable speech comparable to what China's Communist Party does.
Alviani advocates for allowing people and outlets to dispute their fines or revoked credentials.
He also says Taiwanese media need more funds to pay for good journalism, rather than rely on social media for news.
"People don't trust so much their media because the line between the media and entertainment is very blurred in Taiwan," Alviani contends. 

"[Outlets] have an undue pressure to generate audience to their articles."
Government officials say they are aware of concerns that the disinformation crackdown could hinder freedom of the press and expression.
"I think when people still remember the martial law like I do, we just don't want to go back there," says Tang, the digital minister.
The former authoritarian government enforced martial law for almost 40 years until 1987. 

Tang says her parents were journalists and had to work under censorship during that period.
As the government passes tougher legislation to protect Taiwan, it risks affecting the civil liberties Taiwanese have enjoyed for three decades.
"Maybe it's impossible to legislate social media," concedes Ketty Chen, vice president of the government think tank Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. 

"As democracies, a challenge we often face is how you can legislate an individual's right to expression and the freedom of media [and] freedom of journalists to report, to investigate."

TikTok Spying for China

TikTok sent US user data to China, lawsuit claims
BBC News

Video-sharing app TikTok has been hit with a class action lawsuit in the US that claims it transferred "vast quantities" of user data to China.
The lawsuit accuses the company of "surreptitiously" taking content without user consent.
Owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, TikTok has built up a keen US fan base.
TikTok, which is thought to have about half a billion active users worldwide, has previously said it does not store US data on Chinese servers.
However, the platform is facing mounting pressure in North America over data collection and censorship concerns.
The lawsuit filed in a Californian court last week claims TikTok "clandestinely... vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data".
The data could be used to identify, profile and track users in the US "nw and in the future".

Ima

TikTok lets users make short videos and set them to music, before sharing with followers

The plaintiff is named as Misty Hong, a Californian-based university student. 

Ms Hong claims she downloaded the app this year but did not create an account.
Months later the firm had created an account for her, and surreptitiously took draft videos she had created but never intended to publish.
The data was sent to two servers in China, backed by Tencent and Alibaba.
The lawsuit also argues TikTok unfairly profits from "secret harvesting" of private data by using that data to derive "vast targeted-advertising revenues and profits".
TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

What is TikTok?
The platform has exploded in popularity in recent years, mostly with people under 20.
They use the app to share 15-second videos that typically involve lip-synching to songs, comedy routines and unusual editing tricks.
Alongside its rapid expansion, concerns have grown -- chiefly in the US -- over the potential to compromise users' privacy.
US lawmakers have put pressure on the company to clear up allegations that it is beholden to the Chinese state.
TikTok operates a similar but separate version of the app in China, known as Douyin. 

It says all US user data is stored in the United States, with a backup in Singapore.
Still, the company found itself in hot water last week, apologising to a US teenager who was blocked from the service after she posted a viral clip criticising China's treatment of the Uighur Muslims.
The company later lifted the ban.

China's Final Solution: TikTok parent company ByteDance is working with China's Communist Party to spread propaganda on East Turkestan

• ByteDance, the company that owns the viral video app TikTok, is working closely with China's government to facilitate human-rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in China's western colony of East Turkestan.
• The report, titled "Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance," looked at the way major Chinese tech companies were involved in state-sanctioned surveillance and censorship using artificial intelligence packaged as popular apps and websites.
• ByteDance is collaborating with public security bureaus across China, including in East Turkestan where it plays an active role in disseminating the party-state's propaganda on East Turkestan.
• TikTok has been in the spotlight after it suspended the account of a US teenager Feroza Aziz after she posted a viral video on the app that was disguised as a makeup tutorial but criticized the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan.

By Rosie Perper

The Chinese company that owns the viral video app TikTok is working closely with China's government to facilitate human-rights abuses against Uighur Muslims in the western colony of East Turkestan, according to a new report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
The report, titled "Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance," looked at the way major Chinese tech companies were involved in state-sanctioned surveillance and censorship using artificial intelligence packaged as popular apps and websites.
ByteDance, the parent company of the viral-video sensation TikTok, was mentioned in the report alongside other major Chinese tech companies including Huawei, Tencent, and Alibaba, all of which -- ASPI wrote -- "are engaged in deeply unethical behavior in East Turkestan, where their work directly supports and enables mass human rights abuses."
China is running thousands detention centers and forced labor camps in East Turkestan. 

Interviews with people who were held in the facilities reveal beatings and food deprivation, as well as medical experimentation on prisoners.
In its research, ASPI singled out ByteDance and accused it of acting alongside the Communist Party to enforce the country's strict censorship laws.
"ByteDance collaborates with public security bureaus across China, including in East Turkestan where it plays an active role in disseminating the party-state's propaganda on East Turkestan," the report said.
ByteDance operates two versions of its viral video app — a China-based app called Douyin and the global app TikTok.
TikTok is one of the most downloaded phone apps in the world and has already entered more than 150 global markets.
Previous reports cited by ASPI indicated that "East Turkestan Internet Police" had a presence on Douyin in 2018 and created a "new public security and internet social governance model."
ASPI also cited recent reporting that said China's Ministry of Public Security's Press and Publicity Bureau signed an agreement with ByteDance that allowed ministry and police officials to have their own Douyin accounts to push ministry propaganda. 

The report also said ByteDance would "increase its offline cooperation with the police department," though it was unclear what that partnership would entail.

ASPI added that other tech giants, including Alibaba and Huawei, contributed cloud computing and surveillance technologies in East Turkestan.
In October, the US blacklisted 28 Chinese organizations and companies accused of facilitating human-rights abuses in East Turkestan.

And earlier this month, sources told Reuters that the US opened a national security investigation into ByteDance after its $1 billion acquisition of the US social-media app Musical.ly in 2017.
TikTok has been in the spotlight after suspending the account of a US teenager named Feroza Aziz who posted a viral video on the app that was disguised as a makeup tutorial but criticized the Chinese government's treatment of Uighurs in East Turkestan.
The company apologized in a statement published to its website on Wednesday, saying that it stood behind its initial decision to suspend Aziz's account but that its moderation process "will not be perfect."
East Turkestan has a population of about 10 million, many of whom are Uighur or other ethnic minorities. 

In May, US Assistant Secretary of Defense Randall Schriver said "at least a million but likely closer to 3 million citizens" were detained detention camps.
Satellite images reviewed by the Washington-based East Turkistan National Awakening Movement earlier this month identified at least 465 detention centers, labor camps, and suspected prisons in East Turkestan.
And a recent leak of classified Chinese government documents known as the "China Cables" laid out a manual for exactly how the detention centers were to operate, preventing escape by double locking all the doors and using a "points system" based on behavior that is linked "directly to rewards, punishments, and family visits".

Chinese Fifth Column

Zuckerberg’s Anti-Tyranny Rhetoric Roils Chinese Employees
Tensions between Facebook’s large community of Chinese employees and the company’s management have been on the rise since Zuckerberg became more critical of Beijing. 

By Wayne Ma

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Georgetown address about free speech last month drew hostility and skeptical commentary from his Chinese employees. 

Zuckerberg’s criticism of Chinese video app TikTok and China’s censorship of the internet renewed long-standing complaints that Facebook’s management is biased against communist China, according to one Chinese employee who saw messages in Facebook’s internal discussion groups.

Tensions between Facebook management and its large fifth column of Chinese employees have been on the upswing over the past year or so, since Zuckerberg abandoned efforts to get Facebook allowed back into China and instead became more critical of Beijing. 

Many of the company’s newer Chinese employees were hired from mainland China and are unapologetically supportive of the Chinese government.

Facebook is grappling with its large fifth column of Chinese employees, some of whom are becoming more vocal and critical in internal company forums over what they claim is a bias against communist China.

But in the past couple of months complaints of anti-China bias have overlapped with unhappiness about working conditions at Facebook, crystallized by the suicide of a Chinese employee at Facebook headquarters. 

Infiltration by Chinese Spies
The increasingly vocal criticism by Chinese employees is the latest example of how workers at big tech companies such as Google and Amazon have turned pro-China activists, protesting their employers’ business dealings with the U.S. government and complaining about other issues. 

But in this case, Zuckerberg has to walk a fine line, trying to keep an aggressive group of Chinese employees happy while not alienating Facebook’s many anti-China critics in Washington, D.C. 

If he goes too far to appease the Chinese employees, he could hand his critics in Washington more ammunition.

“We’re seeing Chinese employees emerge as a dangerous force from tech companies,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Paulson Institute whose research focuses on the relationship between Silicon Valley and China. 

Further complicating the challenges facing Zuckerberg are comments by longtime Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who accused Google of working with China’s military and that its leadership has been infiltrated by Chinese spies. 

Thiel said Google was behaving in a “seemingly treasonous” manner. 

A Large Chinese Fifth Column
The ranks of Chinese workers at Facebook—the vast majority of whom are software engineers and data and research scientists—have been increasing in recent years, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
The total number couldn’t be learned, although it likely numbers in the thousands (Facebook employed nearly 36,000 people as of Dec. 31). 

Facebook has more Chinese as a share of its U.S. workforce than Apple, Google or Microsoft, according to an analysis of federal filings. 

Some 42% of its U.S. employees were Chinese in 2018, up from about a third in 2014, the filings show. At Google, the percentage in 2018 was 37% and at Apple it was 23%. 

Facebook’s share of green card sponsorships for Chinese employees also has been growing annually since 2013, rising from 25% to 44% of sponsorships in the nine months ending in June.
The internal group Chinese@FB, which Facebook hosts for its Chinese employees, counts more than 6,000 members and is the largest of its kind at the company, current and former employees say.
One former Chinese employee, who worked at Facebook between 2015 and 2019, said there were so many Chinese employees that he sometimes could get away with speaking only Chinese at work. 

Other former Chinese employees recounted being asked by their managers to be mindful of non-Chinese speakers after holding work conversations in Chinese.Chinese workers said they were drawn to Facebook’s results-focused culture and by what they said was its willingness to quickly sponsor employees for permanent residency in the U.S. 

Many Chinese employees hired a decade or so ago rose through the ranks to become directors and vice presidents, which has led to even more hiring of Chinese workers, according to current and former employees. But as the number of Chinese hires has increased, Facebook has had to rely more on mainland China as a source of new talent. 

A decade ago, many of Facebook’s Chinese hires were employees with graduate degrees from American universities who had spent years getting used to the country’s culture.  

In contrast, many of these newer hires haven’t spent as much time in the U.S. and still get their news from China’s state-controlled media and use Chinese social media to keep in touch with friends and family back home, several current and former Chinese employees said. 

They don’t share the U.S. view of the internet as a haven for free speech and open debate.
These employees added that China’s rise as an economic, technological and political power in recent years has made Chinese nationals more assertive about their country’s place in the world.

National Security Risk

Facebook has taken a number of steps in the past year that have been interpreted by its Chinese employees as hostile to the Chinese government. 

Last year Facebook invited Taiwan’s president to a Facebook-sponsored event in Taipei promoting the territory’s economy and e-commerce industry. 

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen posed for photos with Facebook Vice President for Asia-Pacific Dan Neary and gave a speech highlighting Taiwan’s strong ties with Facebook. 

Chinese employees said in internal groups that the meeting legitimized Taiwan’s claim to self-rule and jeopardized Facebook’s chances of entering China. 

Simon Milner, Facebook vice president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, was forced to defend the event in the messaging groups, according to employees who saw the messages.
Zuckerberg’s public comments have also turned more critical of communist China. 

In March, for instance, Zuckerberg said Facebook would never host data in countries with a track record of violating human rights and last month he said it was never able to reach an agreement with Chinese authorities over how to operate its services free from censorship.
Also this year, Facebook’s Milner visited Hong Kong where he met with a number of local lawmakers and government officials, according to two people familiar with the meetings, which were announced in Facebook’s internal groups. 

The meeting sparked online complaints after Milner met with Alvin Yeung, a Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator, saying the meeting could be viewed as legitimizing pro-democracy demonstrators’ claims to self-autonomy, the people said.
The pro-China activism within the Chinese employee community, and the criticisms of the company they sometimes spark, has alarmed some senior Facebook executives, said a person who is familiar with management’s thinking. 

Some executives, including David Wei, a Facebook vice president of engineering many Chinese Facebook employees said acts as an informal liaison between senior management and Chinese employees, are closely monitoring the internal message groups and have moved to clamp down on discussions when they get heated, the person said. 

For instance, in September, Wei weighed in, urging calm.
“I would encourage everyone in the discussion to try your best to understand each other’s point of view,” he wrote in a post on Chinese@FB. 

“When a discussion gets heated, consider having a tea time in person. Our respectful communication policy ask is that we don’t attempt to convert people’s political views.”

Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment about these specific incidents with Chinese employees. 

Chinese Espionage

Chinese tech firms don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt

By Josh Rogin

A man walks past signage for Chinese company ByteDance's app TikTok, known locally as Douyin, at the International Artificial Products Expo in Hangzhou, China, Oct. 18. 

The U.S. government and Congress are grappling with a new and daunting challenge: Chinese are amassing personal data on Americans at an alarming rate. 

But while there’s no firm plan on what to do about it, there’s consensus on the one thing we can’t do: trust Chinese tech firms to protect our data from the Chinese government and preserve Americans’ free speech.
“Parents, if you don’t know what TikTok is, you should. It’s a Chinese-owned social media platform so popular among teens that Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly spooked,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) said at a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and terrorism. 

“For Facebook, the fear is lost social media market share. For the rest of us, the fear is somewhat different. A company compromised by the Chinese Communist Party knows where your children are, knows what they look like, what their voices sound like, what they’re watching and what they share with each other.”
If that sounds alarmist, it’s because the facts are alarming. 

Representatives from TikTok and pro-China Apple (which was also invited to Hawley’s hearing) declined to testify at Hawley’s hearing, but TikTok defended itself in a statement Hawley read at the hearing.
“No governments, foreign or domestic, direct how we moderate TikTok content. TikTok does not remove content based on sensitivities related to China or any countries. We have never been asked by the Chinese government to remove any content and we would not do so if asked,” their statement said.
TikTok’s claims are contradicted by claims of former employees, who have told The Post that content decisions were made by company moderators in China.
“The former employees said their attempts to persuade Chinese teams not to block or penalize certain videos were routinely ignored, out of caution about the Chinese government’s restrictions and previous penalties on other ByteDance apps,” The Post reported.
ByteDance is the Chinese tech giant that owns TikTok. 

In September, the Guardian reported on internal guidelines that revealed ByteDance had instructed the censorship of content related to Tibet, the Tiananmen Square massacre and the Falun Gong religious sect. 

Chinese tech firms know the punishment if they don’t implement the censorship on their own; the government doesn’t even have to ask.
And, as Hawley pointed out, no Chinese or American tech company can credibly claim it would refuse a request for data on its users if it got a “knock on the door” from Chinese authorities. 

That’s why the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) opened an investigation into ByteDance’s 2017 acquisition of Musical.ly, which it renamed TikTok.
Anyone who doesn’t understand that all Americans’ data held by a Chinese tech firm is susceptible to Chinese government exploitation has “a fundamental misunderstanding of how the government in Beijing works,” Klon Kitchen, tech policy lead at the Heritage Foundation, testified at Tuesday’s hearing.
TikTok is only the latest Chinese-owned tech firm operating in the United States to be caught taking direction from its superiors in Beijing after claiming it wouldn’t. 

When Chinese tech giant Kunlun took over the gay dating app Grindr, it gave access of its user database to engineers in Beijing for a period of several months, NBC later revealed.
CFIUS is compelling Kunlun to sell Grindr and ordering it to keep all U.S. user data in the United States. 

But it’s too late. 

Once the sexual identity, habits and health statuses of millions of Americans are in Chinese hands, they can never be taken back. 

There’s zero doubt that Beijing is feeding all that information into the database it’s building to advance its own interests at our expense.
The implications are chilling. 

Just think if Beijing cross-referenced Grindr user data with the 22 million secret files on Americans China stole from the Office of Personnel Management in a 2015 hack. 

The intelligence advantages are obvious and dangerous.
That naturally brings up the question of what can be done apart from banning Chinese tech firms from operating inside the United States.

William A. Carter, deputy director of the Technology Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, testified that the U.S. government must drastically increase its efforts to help companies protect Americans’ data, punish those who don’t, and work to establish and enforce international norms in this area.
But it’s not just about Americans’ past behavior and data; it’s also about the future information environment. 

In her company’s statement, TikTok’s U.S. general manager, Vanessa Pappas, identified a future risk in Chinese control over U.S. social media networks: the potential for covert election interference.
“TikTok team, senior staff and myself understand the importance of building a close and transparent working relationship with regulators and lawmakers,” she wrote. 

“This will be increasingly important during the upcoming U.S. election season.”
In other words, if Beijing can censor what Americans see in their social media streams on Tibet, they could censor what we see about President Trump, Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren just as easily. 

We would never know. 

The algorithms are secret. 

There is no transparency. 

And based on the record of the Chinese government and Chinese tech firms, we would be stupid to just take their word for it.

Chinese Peril

US Opens National Security Investigation Into TikTok

BY BOWEN XIAO

The logo of TikTok application is seen on a mobile phone screen in this picture illustration taken Feb. 21, 2019. 

A national security review of Chinese-owned TikTok’s $1 billion acquisition of U.S. social media app Musical.ly has been opened by the U.S. government, three unidentified sources told Reuters.
U.S. lawmakers have only recently called for a national security probe into the popular Chinese video-sharing app, though the acquisition by TikTok—which is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance Technology Co.—was completed in 2017. 

Concerns include the company censoring politically sensitive content, and how it stores users’ personal data.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews deals by foreign acquirers for potential national security risks, has started its review of the Musical.ly deal, the sources told Reuters. 

TikTok didn’t seek clearance from CFIUS when it acquired Musical.ly, the committee said, which gives the U.S. security panel scope to investigate it now.
CFIUS, which is chaired by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, didn’t respond to an Epoch Times request through the Treasury Department to confirm if such a review had been initiated.
In an Oct. 9 letter to Mnuchin, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) urged a national security panel to review the acquisition over concerns that Chinese-owned apps such as TikTok “are increasingly being used to censor content and silence open discussion on topics deemed sensitive by the Chinese Government and Communist Party.”
Under the Trump administration, there has also been increasing concern about technology transfers between Washington and Beijing. 

Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the ranking member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, recently called for the U.S. government to accelerate plans to establish rules on exports of critical technologies to China while expressing a “deep concern” at the current rate of the regulatory rollout.
Michael Brown, the director of the Defense Innovation Unit at the Department of Defense, said at a recent panel event that Beijing is now leading in a number of emerging revolutionary technology industries such as hypersonics and artificial intelligence and said the United States’ relationship with the Chinese Communist Party must change when it comes to technology transfers, The Epoch Times previously reported.
TikTok allows users to create and share short videos, and the app is growing in popularity among U.S. teenagers. 

About 60 percent of TikTok’s 26.5 million monthly active users in the United States are between the ages of 16 and 24, the company said this year.
The sources told Reuters that CFIUS is in talks with TikTok about measures it could take to avoid divesting the Musical.ly assets it acquired. 

The sources requested anonymity because CFIUS reviews are confidential.
A TikTok spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request by The Epoch Times for comment, but a spokesperson told Reuters the company “has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S. Part of that effort includes working with Congress, and we are committed to doing so.” 

The spokesperson said he or she can’t comment on ongoing regulatory processes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) sent a letter last week to acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire asking for a national security probe, saying they were concerned about the app’s collection of user data, and whether China censors the content U.S. users can see. 

They also suggested TikTok could be targeted by foreign influence campaigns.
The company has said U.S. users’ data is stored in the United States, but the senators noted that ByteDance is governed by Chinese laws. 

TikTok claims China doesn’t have jurisdiction over the content of the app.
In October, the Trump administration placed 28 Chinese public security bureaus and companies—including video surveillance company Hikvision and seven other companies—on a blacklist due to concerns of human rights abuses.
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has in the past gone to great lengths to please Chinese officials, recently made a speech at Georgetown University in which he criticized the Chinese regime for its internet censorship.
“China is building its own internet focused on very different values,” Zuckerberg said, noting that the Chinese regime “is now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries” through popular China-developed internet platforms.

Wicked Xi and the Traitorous Apple

Apple and TikTok's China ties are national security threats
By Kim Hart

Senator Josh Hawley. 

Sen. Josh Hawley says Apple and TikTok are threatening U.S. national security through their Chinese operations and connections.
In an exclusive interview with "Axios on HBO," the Missouri Republican called out Apple for choosing Chinese profits over American values. 

He also called on TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, to testify under oath that it does not share American data with China's Communist Party.

Why it matters: On Tuesday, Hawley will chair a hearing highlighting the compromises that, he argues, U.S. tech companies make to do business in China. 

The hearing comes amid increasing tensions over trade and technology transfers between the U.S. and China.
Hawley invited Apple and TikTok executives to testify at Tuesday's hearing, called “How Corporations and Big Tech Leave Our Data Exposed to Criminals, China, and Other Bad Actors.”
The companies declined to appear, as of Sunday. 

The subcommittee will have open chairs for them during the hearing.

Hawley said he has two primary concerns:
American tech companies making deals with China's government to do business there.
China-based tech companies that are growing rapidly in America and collecting U.S. consumer data in the process.
"[As] these Big Tech companies try to get into the Chinese market, the compromises that they have to make with the Communist Chinese Party — who, let's not forget, partner with or control every industry of any size in China — what does that do to American security?" Hawley told "Axios on HBO."

The big picture: Hawley, who chairs the Senate Judiciary crime and terrorism subcommittee, is one of the most vocal Republican critics of Silicon Valley in Congress.
Lawmakers are already skeptical of TikTok's ties to China. 

Last week, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked for a national security review of the platform.
On Friday, Reuters reported the U.S. government has opened a national security investigation into TikTok owner's acquisition of social media app Musical.ly two years ago.

The other side: TikTok, which is very popular among teenagers, has said all U.S. user data is stored in the U.S., with a backup server in Singapore. 

That doesn't ease Hawley's concerns.
"I would say that doesn't necessarily mean that the communist government doesn't have access to the data," he said. 

"I don't know that it matters where the data is stored for that kind of a company. I think you've got to assume that there is a backdoor way into that data."
He added that TikTok is a company people don't know much about. 

"Maybe it's growing in popularity, but what exactly does that company do? What's happening to our data when we use the app? Americans deserve answers."
A TikTok spokesperson said in a statement provided to Axios that the company appreciates the invitation to the hearing. 

"Unfortunately, on short notice, we were unable to provide a witness who would be able to contribute to a substantive discussion."
"We remain committed to working productively with Congress as it looks at how to secure the data of American users, protect their privacy, promote free expression, ensure competition and choice among internet platforms, and preserve U.S. national security interests," the spokesperson continued.

Apple, for its part, has said it uses encryption across devices and servers in all countries and insists there are no backdoors into data centers or systems. 

When asked about these security practices, Hawley wasn't comforted.
"My question is, are they storing encryption keys in China? The answer to that is yes. Then what kind of data are they storing in China? Whose data? Any American data? What about people who have Chinese relatives or business partners or other ventures, so they're communicating with people in China? Does that expose American users to potential surveillance by the Chinese state?"
Apple declined to comment on this story. 

However, it previously said that Apple — not its Chinese partner — retains control over encryption keys to iCloud data stored there.
Hawley said Silicon Valley needs to make a stand against China.
"They're willing to trade our basic democratic values and the privacy and security of Americans in order to make a buck in China and to get the favor of the Beijing government."

The bottom line: Hawley said his concern is that "the Communist Party could be scooping up" troves of data from the U.S. teenagers using TikTok and Apple products and apps.
"Think about what it will mean in 20 years when there's that much more data on them. Think about the profiles that American companies, [and] Chinese companies connected to the Communist Party, could build on people who are today just in their teens. I mean, these are the things that as a parent with two small children at home, I worry about every day."

                                                                                                      — Josh Hawley