TikTok's Useful Idiots: Dancing to Beijing’s Tune

Viral Trend Spy Games on Your Smartphone

Today one has to marvel at the mental gymnastics required to defend TikTok, an app designed not only to collect your data but to export it to Beijing for careful scrutiny by a government that views the United States with all the warmth of a hungry coyote eyeing your unsuspecting neighbors poodle. And yet, politicians—some with direct financial ties to ByteDance—and social media influencers, whose moral compasses are set permanently to “spin,” have rushed to TikTok's defense as if it were the Bill of Rights incarnate. Let me unpack the absurdity of their arguments.

First, there is the lazy equivalence argument: “All social media companies collect data, so why single out TikTok?” Which is a whataboutism that would make even Nikkita Khruschev’’s Kremlin blush in it’s ignorant insincerity. While it is true, all social media companies engage in digital hoarding and even engaged in the for profit sale of that data, there’s a critical distinction that TikTok’s defenders fail—or refuse—to acknowledge: Meta and Google are answerable to U.S. law, however imperfectly enforced, and subject to a modicum of transparency. ByteDance, on the other hand, answers to the Chinese Communist Party, which, for all its virtues (do let me know if you find any), does not exactly prioritize user privacy or the sovereignty of foreign nations. To suggest that handing data to TikTok is the same as handing it to Facebook or Twitter is like comparing giving your house keys to your neighbor to tossing them to a strung out junkie burglar.

Dancing for Data

To those who are dismissing concerns about this data collection as paranoid hysteria, allow me to offer a brief primer on how modern intelligence operations work. The data TikTok collects isn’t just for serving ads or recommending the latest viral trend. It’s a treasure trove of vulnerabilities—blackmail waiting to happen, behavioral blueprints ripe for manipulation, and a weapon for undermining not just individuals, but entire institutions.

Starting with the obvious: blackmail. TikTok collects biometric data, including facial recognition and voiceprints, geolocation metadata, browsing habits, and even details about app usage outside TikTok itself. This isn’t just a collection of your child’s embarrassing dance moves; it’s a comprehensive dossier that maps out their personality, habits, and network of connections. In the cusp of the AI revolution and deepfake technology how do you think this could play out? Knowing that terror now consider this: today’s high school student—the one oversharing on TikTok—could be tomorrow’s federal employee, contractor, or military officer. By then, their digital footprint, long since logged and analyzed by the CCP, becomes a weapon. A late-night message, a questionable post, or even a fabricated narrative based on their data can suddenly emerge, wielded like a knife against the stability of their career or their loyalty to their country.

But why wait for tomorrow when you can act today? Behavioral analysis—the ability to predict and manipulate actions—is already in play. TikTok’s algorithm isn’t just learning what users like; it’s understanding why they like it. I touched on this yesterday when I wrote about the cultural aspects and influence. This insight allows for precise psychological profiling, which can be used to tailor influence campaigns that subtly nudge individuals—or even entire demographics—toward desired behaviors. A federal employee scrolling TikTok during lunch might be fed some content that questions government policies or amplifies divisive rhetoric. Maybe they disagree with it, or like it or comment on it. Multiply this by millions of users, and you have an entire workforce subtly steered toward cynicism or dysfunction.

Then there’s geolocation tracking, a seemingly benign feature that tells TikTok where its users are at all times. For federal employees or contractors working on classified projects, this is an intelligence goldmine. Not only can their movements be tracked in real-time, but patterns of behavior like frequent visits to sensitive sites can be deduced, we already do this with other apps, but with TikTok we're gifting it to a surveillance state thousands of miles away with nothing but time and interest. Imagine this data in the hands of an adversary. It’s not hard to connect the dots between tracking a scientist commuting to a research lab and pinpointing a potential target for espionage.

But the CCP doesn’t think merely in terms of the immediate. They’re playing the long game. Imagine a child in high school today, sharing silly videos with friends, completely unaware that every click, every like, every location is being recorded. Fast forward 20 years: that same individual has risen to a position of power, responsibility, or influence. The CCP now holds decades of behavioral data on large swaths of our population—data that can be weaponized at any moment today or tomorrow. A fabricated scandal, a leaked private message, or a targeted smear campaign could derail a career, destroy a family, compromise an institution, or influence policy decisions at the highest levels. All because we allowed an app to run unchecked in the formative years of their lives.

This isn't science fiction. It’s happening now, and the implications are chilling. The CCP isn’t collecting data for entertainment; it’s assembling a mosaic of vulnerabilities that it can exploit, not just today but for decades to come. And the most astonishing part? We’re handing it to them willingly, packaged with hashtags and choreographed dances.

Back to the Useful Idiots

Then there’s this monumentally stupid argument I heard just this morning advanced by a certain MAHA dim bulb Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose name, it seems, is the only inheritance from his family’s legacy of political discernment, after all his dad and JFK at least understood the Soviets were a threat. According to RFK, it’s somehow worse to have our government “spy on us” than for the Chinese to have access to our data as he calls it “teenage girls doing things with their hair.” One imagines he delivered this with the solemn conviction of a man who has recently bumped his head, or had a worm eat an important part of it. Of course, no one enjoys the idea of domestic surveillance and we should oppose it’s abuse. However, even the most insidious surveillance by the U.S. government is at least tethered, however tenuously, to maintaining stability and a functioning state. The Chinese, on the other hand, collect your data with the specific aim of destabilizing that state—an important distinction that Mr. Kennedy, in his crusade to defend the indefensible, conveniently overlooks.

Perhaps more galling, though, is the parade of influencers leaping to TikTok’s defense. These are the same individuals who, with breathtaking irony, use their platforms to decry corporate greed, authoritarianism, and the erosion of privacy. One might think that their apparent horror at surveillance capitalism would extend to a company whose parent organization operates in a nation where dissent is punishable by disappearance. But no—the lure of algorithmic relevance and revenue proves entirely too strong, and these self-styled “truth-tellers” willingly shill for a platform that treats its users as a commodity to be packaged, analyzed, and delivered to the CCP. It’s as if they’ve mistaken their digital popularity for some kind of moral authority—a delusion that becomes ever more laughable with every choreographed dance routine.

What makes this defense truly insidious is the underlying assumption that China’s data collection is somehow harmless. The argument goes: What could Beijing possibly want with the browsing habits of teenagers or the geolocation of a mom in Des Moines? The answer is everything. The CCP’s approach to data isn’t about isolated incidents; it’s about patterns, vulnerabilities, and the slow erosion of national coherence. They aren’t looking to blackmail you for your late-night Amazon purchases—they’re building a mosaic of influence, a map of how to weaken the pillars of a society that they view not as a competitor but as an adversary.

And while I’m sure TikTok’s defenders will wave off such concerns as alarmism, consider the historical record. The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) hack and the Equifax breach both provided China with invaluable personal data, likely used to compromise individuals and institutions. But TikTok is far more insidious: it doesn’t just collect data—it shapes the perceptions of its users. It transforms a generation into spectators, passive consumers of spectacle, instead of participants in their own society. It’s a digital opium war, and the influencers championing TikTok as a harmless app are its unwitting soldiers.

This brings me to the politicians. Those who profit from ByteDance’s generosity in contributions—or fear even in some cases losing their slice of the influencer economy—have revealed their allegiances, and they are not to their constituents. To watch them twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels in defense of a platform that is actively compromising national security is both pathetic and enraging. They feign ignorance of the CCP’s ambitions and dismiss legitimate concerns as “fearmongering,” all the while enjoying campaign contributions or slick media campaigns funded by the very people they ought to oppose.

What’s most striking, however, is the failure to grasp the stakes. The Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the mandate for ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations was not just a matter of security—it was a matter of sovereignty. Data is the lifeblood of modern power, and allowing a foreign adversary unfettered access to the digital DNA of our citizens is tantamount to surrender.

So we should all be clear on at least one thing: defending TikTok isn’t a principled stand for free speech or consumer choice as a neophyte libertarian would try to argue. It’s the capitulation of a distracted, myopic elite, unwilling or unable to recognize that they are aiding an adversary bent on their destruction, or at best it’s marginalization. As for those influencers and politicians who dare to equate ByteDance with Silicon Valley or dismiss China’s intentions as benign, one can only hope that history will remember them for what they truly are—useful idiots in service of a far greater threat.

TikTok’s defenders, in their ignorance or self-interest, are playing a dangerous game. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it’s a game China is all too adept at winning. It’s probably because the Chinese know better than to allow their kids to use TikTok. You would figure that itself would be a lesson to the rest of us.

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