If you ask, the short-form video app TikTok is where you watch goofy dances and makeup tutorials, or it is a gravely sophisticated threat to US national security.
Because TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance - and because China is known to be interested in having its technology companies share the data it collects - its ubiquitous popularity among Americans has geopolitical implications beyond the mobile-phone screen.
Like US-owned social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, TikTok collects all kinds of data about each user and uses that information to deliver more of what the person seems to want.
TikTok is viewed as the most advanced and uncannily effective at learning about your interests based on how long you stay with a video and whether you like to forward or comment on it, and delivering more of that to your For You feed through its algorithm. That makes Chinese ownership of TikTok particularly worrisome in the eyes of US critics, the most salient difference between it and other social media. American adult users of TikTok will spend an average of 56 minutes a day on the app this year, much more than on Facebook or Instagram, according to researcher Insider Intelligence.
The national security concerns involve hypothetical, but not implausible, scenarios in which China s government employs its influence over ByteDance to turn TikTok into an instrument of harm against American interests through such channels as:
In December, the chief executives of TikTok and ByteDance admitted that ByteDance employees had inappropriately accessed the IP address of American users, including journalists writing critical stories about the company.
The Justice Department is investigating whether that was a case of improper surveillance of Americans. There have been reports in recent years about China trying to influence US politics, including elections, although not involving TikTok specifically. These types of campaigns are omnipresent across all social media apps.