Editor’s Note: Alex Stamos is a founding partner of the Krebs Stamos Group as well as the founder and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory. Prior to launching KSG and the SIO, Alex served as the chief security officer of Facebook and as the chief information security officer at Yahoo. The views expressed here are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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The multi-year saga of TikTok’s struggles in Washington is approaching a dramatic climax. As the company’s CEO testifies in front of the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Thursday, two widely different visions of the company will be on display.
To the young people around the world who spend hours per day watching the pithy, entertaining short videos, TikTok is the product that won their attention with an almost creepily smart discovery algorithm and a carefully cultivated community of top creators.
To the western world’s national security establishment, however, TikTok is a Trojan horse, bringing the long arm of China into the homes and workplaces of their citizens via its China-based parent company, ByteDance.
From my seat, as somebody who dealt with continuous state-sponsored attacks from countries around the world as the chief security officer at Facebook, and now running a research group at Stanford focused on online harms, there are indeed many legitimate concerns about TikTok. But those concerns are bigger than one company, and the Biden administration is missing an opportunity to lead the free world in addressing the big picture.
TikTok is only one chess piece in the global struggle to gather and control information. An important one, to be sure, but Washington’s laser-focus on capturing this one piece has blinded it to the bigger game.
We are clearly at the start of a long struggle between the world’s democracies and a new coalition of autocracies, led by a Chinese Communist Party that is emerging from the Covid-19 crisis with its most autocratic leader since Mao Zedong and a burning desire to demonstrate the power of the People’s Republic domestically and abroad.
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit this week to a battered, beleaguered Vladimir Putin only highlighted its new role, as the Chinese leader publicly legitimized a Russian president who was…
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