Ban TikTok from Operating in America

A series of reports detailing TikTok’s undeniable ties to China has once again subjected the company to the sort of scrutiny that it deserves, making it more likely that Congress or the executive branch institutes a ban on the TikTok app.

Since June, we’ve learned, among other things, that engineers in China accessed the data of TikTok users, that another China-based team planned to monitor the locations of specific U.S. citizens, that there are no meaningful firewalls blocking TikTok’s U.S. operations from its China-based parent ByteDance, and that 300 TikTok and ByteDance employees have come from Chinese state media outlets.

The upshot is simple. There’s very little — if anything at all — that separates TikTok from ByteDance. And ByteDance’s connections to the Chinese Communist Party, including an internal CCP committee that meets at the company’s headquarters to study party orthodoxy and that has a contract to promote propaganda surrounding the mass abuses against Uyghurs, are reason enough to bar TikTok from operating in the U.S.