Megan Basham exposes TikTok’s ByteDance ownership as a national security threat, revealing China’s alleged backdoor access to user data—keystrokes, biometrics, and location—of its billion global users, especially teens. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr and ex-DoD software officer Nicholas Chailan warn of AI-driven propaganda targeting U.S. officials like Eric Swalwell, with India’s 2020 ban ignored by slow-moving U.S. lawmakers despite bipartisan warnings from Rubio and Warner. TikTok’s addictive design lures users from Facebook, while its algorithm allegedly pushes CCP-approved content, including censored topics like Tiananmen Square, and manipulates trends like "sexual oddity" videos, reflecting China’s own cultural restrictions. Despite calls for U.S.-based alternatives, unchecked data harvesting and algorithmic influence remain systemic risks across social media. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, we are always delighted when it's time to talk to Megan Basham.
You know, the Daily Wire's coverage of a lot of stuff has gone really gotten so much better recently.
And a good percentage of the reason is Megan's coverage of the culture.
She's doing a great job.
She's worked all over the place.
Wall Street Journal, National Review, Focus on the Family, The Washington Times, and she is the author of Beside Every Successful Man.
And we talk to her every month because we like to.
Megan, it's good to see you.
It's good to be here.
I like being here every month.
Oh, yeah.
No, you're just, you're doing great.
You really are.
The reporting is just excellent.
You're doing a story now about TikTok.
So for someone like me, I don't use TikTok very much.
I see it.
Most of the time when I see it, it's libs of TikTok just showing me crazy people.
What is the problem with TikTok that you have, that's now becoming really, really a crisis almost?
Well, and I was like you, Drew.
I didn't use it very often.
I don't use it at all, really, other than when I'm looking at it for stories.
I don't let my kids use it.
We don't have social media.
So it really wasn't on my radar personally until I started covering this story.
And then you realize that this actually matters to everybody, whether you use TikTok or not.
Part of the issue here is that, you know, we hear a lot of stories about data harvesting from big tech.
And that's scary enough when you're thinking about Mark Zuckerberg doing it.
But now think about the Chinese Communist Party doing it.
And so that's part of what is so scary here is that it's owned by a company called Byte Dance, which is based in China.
And, you know, for a while, they would try to sort of hedge and say, well, we have moved our servers and our data storage to Houston and it's now housed by Oracle.
Therefore, it's not really connected to the Chinese party.
And then, you know, just about a few weeks ago, stories started coming out in BuzzFeed and other outlets that indicated internally they knew that it really doesn't matter where the data is stored, China has access to it.
They built this technology.
They have backdoor access to keystrokes, face prints, fingerprints, search history, location data, all kinds of information for everyone who uses TikTok, which even if you don't, you need to know it's a lot of people, a billion users now on TikTok.
Yeah, so it's now the most visited site on Google.
If you are a young person, you use it more than Google to get restaurant recommendations, to find out information.
If you want to know about something, if you're, you know, in that 13 to 24 year old age range, you're probably going to TikTok to get your information.
So that's one piece of the problem.
And then the other piece of the problem is that we now know that China has been using it to also put forward the messages they want out there.
So not only are your kids and your, if you're using it, information being harvested by China, they are also pushing data towards you, pushing propaganda towards all of these users.
So let's start with, you said they could capture keystrokes.
I assume that means only when you're using TikTok or if you have the TikTok app that you can do.
No, that is, no.
I mean, there have been instances that they have now discovered the application running in the background when it had not been enabled and hadn't been empowered to do that.
So there are so many ramifications of this, Drew.
That includes, you know, the U.S. government doesn't allow it on military-issued devices, but it does not bar the troops from using it on their personal devices.
So that means you have military personnel who are using it on their own iPhone and they're showing their location data, potentially images of the barracks, images of weaponry, of troop formations, all kinds of things.
So it's really a deep rabbit hole and it's a pretty scary one.
Well, what about, what about, you know, you hear about things like people reading faces and things like that.
I mean, what kind of information can they get besides just what you're searching for?
Yeah, that was part of the interesting research in this story was I spoke to FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr.
And what he told me is that there is AI, artificial intelligence that reads your emotions as you're watching these videos, and it's picking up how you're reacting to it.
Do you like something?
Do you not like something?
And that may not seem that scary until you start to think about, okay, if you're China, how might they be using this information?
And one of the ways they might use it is, I don't know, let's just say hypothetically, you're a California congressman and a Chinese asset wants to get close to you.
I'm not thinking anyone in particular, but say like arbitrarily Eric Swalwell, someone like that.
And if they want to know what you're interested in, if you like phishing, if you like certain kind of books, that kind of information can be used to then cozy up and create a relationship and make inroads, not just with government officials, but also with private sector, heads of companies, really a lot of ways you could use this information.
And that is what Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, was really stressing.
And it's part of why he has been pushing both the Biden administration to act on this.
I mean, he is very much in the camp of we need to get rid of TikTok altogether.
It should be banned in our country.
India banned it in 2020 for national security reasons.
And so that's the position he's coming from.
But also from the private sector, he has asked Google and Apple to remove this app from their app stores.
And they've not responded to him, which is a little frustrating because we know from the parlor debacle that they can move applications pretty fast off of their stores when they want to.
In this case, for whatever reason, they just don't seem to want to.
So they're happy with banning, for instance, the president of the United States who they don't like, but not China.
I mean, this seems like, it seems like a no-brainer to me if they're reading people's faces, if they can read people's faces and find out what they like and really get that kind of personal information on them.
And they are trying to, you know, they are our enemies.
Why, what's the, what's the argument against banning them?
Well, that's a good question.
As you look into it, there's not really much argument.
There's nobody saying, hey, TikTok's great.
Let's just keep it.
And you have to say the Biden administration is not doing that either.
What they're doing is kind of this perpetual, we're studying the situation.
And I asked Carr, why did they roll back the Trump administration moves to do something about TikTok?
If you remember, the Trump administration was trying to get rid of it.
It said it needed to be owned by a U.S. or European company in order to remain in the U.S.
And, you know, Carr told me for whatever reason, he thinks it's this, frankly.
He thinks that it was just sort of this attitude that anything that was a Trump administration priority was just going to be rolled back.
And that was kind of the attitude.
And now what they're doing is they are taking steps.
And you have to say, it is in somewhat, it is a bipartisan approach now.
You have Senator Marco Rubio, you have Senator Mark Warner who are moving on this in a bipartisan way, but it's been very slow.
So you have everybody kind of recognizing we have a problem here.
But both Carr and also I spoke to the former chief software designer of the Air Force and he resigned over this.
He resigned from the Department of Defense and he's kind of been out there talking to everyone.
And he said, the problem is you have a lot of congressmen, you have a lot of senators who don't even know how to put apps on their phone or take them off.
And so they don't really understand this situation.
They don't understand the problem with data.
And it's just been very slow going to learn about it.
Wait, he resigned from the Air Force because of this?
He resigned from the Department of Defense.
Yes.
He was the chief software officer.
And he issued a big letter.
It's a man named Nicholas Chailan.
And his story is fascinating.
He has been blowing the whistle all over.
And I think part of what you asked me about why isn't there more movement to do something about this?
There's also a question of money.
A lot of companies are making a lot of money.
They're advertising on TikTok.
They're hitting that very young demographic that they want.
And somebody like Nicholas Chailan said, you know, he was scheduled to speak to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is the lobbying arm of American Big Business.
The day before he was supposed to do that, he went on Tucker Carlson to talk about this TikTok issue.
One of the things he brought up in that segment was the fact that China doesn't allow TikTok in China.
Of course not.
They're not stupid.
So they have a version.
They have something called doiyan.
And I hope I'm pronouncing that right, but something called doiyan.
It's sort of the Chinese version of TikTok, but it is very different in some significant ways in that it shows educational videos, no twerking, no pornography, educational, very socially positive videos.
And there are very limited rules on how kids can access it.
And so he went on Tucker Carlson to talk about that.
And he said within 12 hours, the Chamber of Commerce had canceled his engagement that he was supposed to have with them.
They didn't tell him why.
They just said they ran out of time.
And then they did not remove him from the email chain.
And he discovered later that though they told him they had to cancel him because of time, that in fact they replaced him with another speaker.
So, you know, his suspicion is that it was done at the behest of possibly TikTok, possibly China.
He doesn't know, but clearly, you know, there's a financial incentive for these companies.
And we have seen American companies kowtowing to China before for financial gain.
So let's go.
I want to go back to something you said earlier about the positive, I don't mean morally positive, but just the active use of propaganda.
You said that China was actually pushing ideas and propaganda to people on TikTok.
Yeah, and I think that is part of the reason that I go, even if you don't use it, we need to be concerned that a huge portion of our population, a huge portion of young voters are watching this.
And what they're finding is that just this week, this just happened this week, Drew, an app called Top Buzz was on the TikTok application.
It was forwarded to millions of American accounts.
And it was pushing Chinese propaganda.
They're pushing the messages they want to push.
One of the things people pointed out, if your kid goes on to TikTok to search something like Tiananmen Square, they're getting CCP approved returns, videos, information that China has sanctioned.
So think about how many millions of kids, teens, people in their 20s are getting their information that way.
And it's all being used, you know, going through China, going through the CCP's approval system.
So, you know, I see all these, you know, libs of TikTok type videos of very disturbed, it seems to me, young people and teachers pushing their sexual oddity to other people and putting it forward as a good thing.
The Chinese have done things like banned overly effeminate men from being entertainers.
They basically said, we don't watch on TV.
They feel that that weakens the society.
And so is there the possibility that they're manipulating that kind of video so more people see it or they can find the people who like it or anything like that?
Absolutely.
They absolutely have that capability to prioritize the kind of videos that will create a disordered social structure.
So yes, I mean, you go, could this be a psyops?
Absolutely.
And, you know, both Nicholas Chilon and Brendan Carr were very specific with me that, look, it may look like it's just a fun entertainment app.
It's a very sophisticated surveillance tool and it's a weapon.
I mean, both of them called TikTok a weapon.
So that really kind of puts it in very stark clarity what we're dealing with here.
Yeah, I mean, it's just, it just seems that this would be a kind of a priority that, you know, we're, we're perfectly capable.
I mean, I don't even like the idea that our government could be getting this kind of information from us.
I certainly don't like the idea that Google could be getting it, but that the Chinese are getting it seems to me even a bridge, two bridges too far.
It seems like it would be a priority.
Why can't we make our own TikTok?
Well, and you know, that's an interesting point is we're kind of starting to see that.
And you go, you went from complaining about, oh, gosh, I don't want Google to have my information.
I don't want Mark Zuckerberg to have it.
And you go, okay, well, hopefully Mark Zuckerberg will come in and build something at least.
I mean, and they are doing that.
And that's kind of what's been interesting is that because TikTok, it was designed to be incredibly addictive.
And China has done studies.
They know that the way it functions, it just feeds these endorphin buzzes to your brain.
And so you swipe and you keep using it.
And so we actually are seeing because it is so popular and it's really actually caused some shakeup in the tech world.
So you have Facebook for the first time ever this week announced that they had a revenue decline and they are losing users to TikTok.
So they are reorganizing their algorithms and user experience to draw people over to Facebook by doing these same kind of videos.
Now, you go, that's sort of a double-edged sword, but a part of you hopes that it works because you go, I would rather have kids, young people on Facebook looking at these videos than Chinese propaganda on TikTok.
Does anybody, I mean, I have very severe views of social media.
I mean, I feel that it needs to be regulated.
And one of the ways I'm not at all against their regulating methods of addiction, things that are purposely designed to addict you, there was a pretty good explanation of this in the Wall Street Journal where they said they can find what you like and then point you to things that you like and then point you from those things that you like to things that they want you to see.
It seems to me that a lot of that needs to be regulated.
Does anybody talk about that or is that just me ranting alone in my room?
No, you know, what's funny is I asked Chai Lan particularly about that and he said, you know, I liked, I don't know what his politics are, but he seemed to me a fairly measured, maybe a broadly conservative guy in that he said, I don't think there needs to be, you know, extreme regulation.
And he said that's part of the fear from, you know, the private sector is they don't want the government to come in and put up so much red tape and so much regulation.
And as a conservative, I certainly understand that.
Regulating Access: Guardrails Needed00:00:38
And he seemed to be sympathetic with that, but he said, look, there needs to be some kind of guardrails on how they're accessing our data and how they're using it.
And he made the point that, look, Facebook's not in China.
They're not able, there aren't two versions of Facebook in the world.
And China doesn't allow their population to just access this technology any way they want.
So it's pretty interesting that we don't have a reciprocal situation here.
So there's a lot of levers that pressure that they could use that they're not using.
Megan, it's always great talking to you.
Megan Basham, check out her stuff on the Daily Wire.