TikTok should be viewed as "another form of heavy Chinese weaponry," billionaire Vinod Khosla assures, who was one of the early sponsors of OpenAI.
He supported the forced separation of the social networking platform TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. In March, Congress passed a bill banning the app in the US unless it sells its operations to local owners.
"Neither I nor my firm can gain or lose anything from this bill, but I see that TikTok could become a weapon of a foreign adversary," Khosla wrote in an article for Financial Times (via Business Insider).
Khosla accused China of maintaining double standards, as Chinese consumers use their own version of TikTok, Douyin — where, according to local legislation, individuals under the age of 14 can only spend 40 minutes a day.
"What's worse, TikTok is like a programmable fentanyl, the effects of which are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party," the billionaire said.
According to Khosla, forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok should "prevent a foreign adversary from controlling the platform," which could "covertly manipulate US citizens" and "promote the ideas of Chinese communists."
"TikTok uses an algorithm based on advanced artificial intelligence. And it is in the hands of the CCP," Khosla wrote. "We should consider it as another weapon that poses a threat to national security."
Khosla is not alone in his concerns about TikTok. Approximately three out of five, or 60% of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center in 2023, stated that they consider the platform a threat to national security.
In its annual threat assessment report published in March, US intelligence claimed that a Chinese propaganda group had used TikTok accounts to target candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties during the 2022 midterm elections.
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