On Super Bowl Sunday, President Biden launched his campaign’s first TikTok video, captioned “lol hey guys.” In the video, he talked about the game and joked about whether Taylor Swift’s relationship with Chiefs’ player Travis Kelce is somehow part of a conspiracy to re-elect him.
Campaigning for the votes of “Gen Z” is understandable. But should any U.S. president be using a Chinese-owned, Communist Party-controlled social media platform to win re-election?
During his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in November, Biden said he wanted to “de-risk,” the U.S. economy from China, not to decouple entirely. But is he de-risking?
Like his bizarre campaign decision to use TikTok, many of Biden’s China policies are surprisingly contradictory, throwing into question his commitment to at least “de-risk.”
Consider that in Dec. 2022, Biden signed legislation banning the use of TikTok on official devices. The White House’s Chief Information Security Officer explained that “the Biden-Harris administration has invested heavily in defending our nation’s digital infrastructure and curbing foreign adversaries’ (that is, China’s) access to American’s data.”
That warning should apply to Americans’ private devices, too.
The bipartisan membership of the U.S. House’s Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party recently described TikTok as a “threat to U.S. national security” and warned that Americans may be “unwittingly compromising themselves to [Chinese Communist Party] surveillance and influence.” The Committee’s Ranking Member, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), noted that “China-based employees are able to both manipulate the algorithm underlying TikTok and also…access U.S. user data.”
After the congressional testimony of TikTok’s CEO, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) warned that his “lack of transparency” and “repeated misstatements of fact…severely undermined the credibility of any statements by TikTok employees.”
Of Biden’s use of TikTok, Warner said he worried about “a mixed message.” He suggested the U.S. should “follow India, which has prohibited TikTok.”
Last March, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned that China could use TikTok to harvest the personal data of its 100 million American users, giving it the ability to control software on their devices and use it as a “tool” that “screams out with national security concerns.”
Just days ago, Wray warned of China’s covert efforts to bug U.S. critical infrastructure networks, noting that China’s malware can act as “offensive weapons within our…infrastructure, poised to attack whenever Beijing decides the time is right.”
China’s interest in harvesting the personal data of Americans isn’t new. In 2020, the Department of Justice charged four members of the Chinese military with stealing the financial records of more than 145 million Americans by breaking into Equifax’s credit reporting records.
TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, remains a key player in the Chinese Communist Party’s digital authoritarianism over the Chinese people, including persecuted national minorities such as the Uyghurs. Chinese law requires social media companies such as TikTok to provide personal data from users to the Chinese government upon request.
The Biden administration’s inconsistent policies in response to China’s cyber-attacks, military threats, and breaches of U.S. university research are unsettling.
In Jan. 2021, Biden left in place a Presidential Memorandum issued by former President Donald Trump directing federal agencies to strengthen protections of government-supported research against “foreign government interference and exploitation,” even though Biden added “equity” concerns to the directive.
In June 2021, Biden ordered that federal agencies examine “potential indicators of risk” associated with social media apps including “ownership, control, or management by persons that support a foreign adversary’s military, intelligence, or proliferation activities,” and if the apps are “subject to coercion or cooption by a foreign adversary” or are “involved in malicious cyber activities.”
He clearly and correctly had China in mind.
But then, in Feb. 2022, Biden disbanded the Justice Department’s China Initiative, even as senior administration officials echoed a false Chinese propaganda argument straight from Chinese communist officials, that DOJ’s investigatory effort had promoted “anti-Asian bias.”
Months later, the Education Department moved its Sec. 117 enforcement responsibilities from the Office of the General Counsel to Federal Student Aid, signaling a degradation in foreign funding disclosure enforcement efforts to research universities targeted by Chinese government gifts and contracts. Remarkably, the move was announced by a higher education industry group long opposed to the department’s previous enforcement efforts.
Reflecting the new approach, the Justice Department in Oct. 2023 entered into a settlement agreement with Stanford University related to its stunning five-year failure to disclose Chinese-funded research agreements in its applications for federal research grants with the Departments of the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. The case was thoroughly and well investigated, but the paltry fine of $1.93 million was barely a parking ticket for a university that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal research grants each year.
The failure to consistently place our national security interests, including the protection of our university research enterprise and Americans’ personal data, above other interests is dismaying.
Cynics might wonder about the impact of the tens of millions of dollars given by (often-anonymous) Chinese donors to the University of Pennsylvania after it established the Penn Biden Center in 2017. Others might wonder about the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate the Biden campaign’s TikTok presence to influence young American voters — and collect their personal data.
The Biden administration walks two very different paths when it comes to this threat. It sometimes clearly identifies the threat, but then it engages in actions which undermine and are contrary to its clear warnings.
These contradictory actions may seem confusing to Congress and the public, but there’s little doubt that China’s shrewd leadership differentiates between mere rhetoric and effective protections – or lack thereof – by Biden’s administration.
Unfortunately, Biden’s “lol hey guys” TikTok debut must have made President Xi “lol” more than almost anyone.
Paul R. Moore, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who served as chief investigative counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, is a senior fellow at the Prague Security Studies Institute.