FBI Director Says TikTok Is a National Security Threat and He's 'Extremely Concerned'
Wray said application programming interfaces, or APIs, that ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, embeds in the videos are a national security concern because China could use them to “control data collection of millions of users or control the recommendation algorithm, which can be used for influence operations.”
“China’s fast-hacking program is the world’s largest, and they have stolen more of Americans’ personal and business data than every other nation combined,” Wray said.
The White House is conducting a security review after Joe Biden dropped a ban on the program that Donald Trump tried to put in place in 2020. Trump was unsuccessful in getting Walmart and Oracle to take over the U.S. segment of the company and take responsibility for handling TikTok’s U.S. user data and content moderation. Legal challenges to Trump’s ban also helped kill it.