Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
FBI Director Christopher Wray announced this Friday that senior US officials are still discussing how to address concerns national security raised by TikTok and reiterated that its biggest concern is that Beijing could use the Chinese-owned application to “control software” of millions of users to “steal information, launch hacking attacks or conducting influence operations.”
“ All these things are in the hands of a government that does not share our values and that you have a mission that is sharply at odds with America’s best interests. That should concern us,” Wray said. interagency,” Wray said at an event at the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.
TikTok has stolen the attention of senior officials for years and it comes because it is known that the Chinese government has the key to the application’s recommendation algorithm . “(This control) allows them to manipulate the content and, if they want, use it for influence operations,” Wray said.
During the talk, the official recalled that the Chinese government targeted the parents of a Chinese student at a major university in the Midwestern United States who posted material online in tribute to the protesters who died during the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1200 in Beijing “this is a Chinese-American student at an American university. Within 80 hours after these things are posted, the services Chinese intelligence officers in China visited their parents and threatened them”.
The This fact caused Wray to point out that “ there is no country, no government that represents a more serious and persistent threat to our innovation
, our ideas and our economic security than the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government.”