TikTok should be seen as «another kind of heavy Chinese weapon», says billionaire Vinod Khosla, who was one of the early sponsors of OpenAI.
He has supported the eminent domain of the social media platform TikTok from its Chinese parent company ByteDance. In March, the Congress passed a bill to ban the app in the US unless it sells its operations to local owners.
«Neither I nor my company have anything to gain or lose from this bill, but I see that TikTok can become a weapon of a foreign enemy,» Khosla wrote in an article for Financial Times (via Business Insider).
Khosla accused China of maintaining a double standard as Chinese consumers use their own version of TikTok, Douyin — where, according to local law, those under 14 can only stay for 40 minutes a day
«To make matters worse, TikTok — is a programmable fentanyl controlled by the Chinese Communist Party», — says the billionaire.
Forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok, according to Khosla, is to «prevent a foreign adversary from controlling a platform» that could «covertly manipulate U.S. citizens» and «promote the ideas of the Chinese Communists».
«TikTok uses an algorithm based on advanced artificial intelligence. And it’s in the hands of a handheld device,” Khosla wrote. «We should treat it the same way as other weapons that pose 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, said they consider the platform a threat to national security.
In its annual threat assessment report released in March, US intelligence alleged that a Chinese propaganda group used TikTok accounts to target Republican and Democratic candidates during the 2022 midterm elections.