Look, I get it: Many people are married to TikTok personally and/or professionally, and the debate around whether or not to ban it in the U.S. can be an emotional one-anything but straight logic-based.

But on the evidentiary record we have involving Chinese-based influence operations, at least on such evidence, there does appear to be some cause to at least investigate TikTok for its potential connection to those same sources that somehow are perpetuating these very activities.

Consider, as an example last week's delayed release by Microsoft, its updated threat analysis; it warned that Chinese-based groups are seeking to influence voters in other nations through coordinated social media activity.

Microsoft stated:

"Influenced by the CCP, deceptive social media accounts have begun to raise contentious questions about contentious U.S. domestic issues to gain insight into key issues dividing U.S. voters. This could be for gathering intelligence and precision on the key voting demographics before the U.S. presidential election."

Here are a few examples Microsoft shared, among others that showed how these fake accounts are being used to gauge U.S. voter sentiment on some issues in which China is particularly interested.
Indeed, according to Microsoft's analysis, these groups have been increasingly targeting topics related to China's activity in the South China Sea, Taiwan, and the U.S. defense industrial base.

Theoretically, these groups could then seek to leverage those accounts as a vector in an attempt to influence U.S. voters, to drive the outcome that will best align with China's interests.

Moreover, Microsoft also noted that lately there has been a growing usage of Chinese AI-generated content:

These posts aim to manipulate and create discord within the U.S. and abroad on a variety of subjects, such as: the train derailment in Kentucky in November 2023, the Maui wildfires in August 2023, the disposal of Japanese nuclear wastewater, the use of drugs in the United States, and the immigration policies as well as racial tensions of the nation.

The idea would be to influence the sentiment of voters through these profiles and apps. And from there, you have to assume that the same types of activities could also be presumed to occur in a Chinese-owned app, into which these groups have had significantly more insight and access.

And TikTok certainly does wield influence, as TikTok itself has inadvertently amplified through its own efforts to oppose the latest ban talk.
This message, encouraging U.S. TikTok users to lobby their local Senator on its behalf, indicates the direct influence that the app can have on user activity, and with 150 million U.S. users, that's a big audience to help spread its message.
And when you also layer on top of that the fact these influence operations have already been found on nearly every other social app originating from China, it makes total sense that perhaps TikTok itself could pose a risk, as we head into the election race.

Does that mean TikTok should be banned? I don't know, and you don't know either.

Currently, senators in the United States who are to vote regarding the ban of TikTok in the United States are briefed with intelligence from all these security agencies that is out of reach for us, the public.

So maybe they're showing them much more evidence than we realise, or perhaps it's all the same stuff, but again, based on the examples of Chinese interference that we are aware of on social apps, it seems like this is a fair question, at the least.

In this sense, it is not about data stealing which, in this debate, sounds a bit of a red herring. The counter argument will be that Meta is also stealing user data but for nefarious potential means while the real concern is influence, and how content served up in an app might shape opinions.

I would bet to guess that this is the much greater part of the consideration. And while the former would similarly argue that Meta, and other U.S.-based social apps, have also sought at different times to influence voter opinions through their own content policies, the point is that: a) These are U.S. companies-not a potential foreign adversary looking to weight the outcome in their favor, and b) All of these companies have been hauled before Congress to answer for such, and have faced tougher regulations, and fines, as a result.

As is the case with TikTok now, because the proposed regulations do not effectively seek to ban the app but rather force it into definitively clear separation from its Chinese ownership.
Emotion apart, there appears to be a case in point here. Be it for or against TikTok.