A report by two former military and intelligence experts warns that China plans to use TikTok to promote communist ideology among young Americans.

The open-source research report, “TikTok Operations in the United States: Unveiling Strategic Moves, Scientific Insights and What Lies Ahead,” examines the current legal requirement to force TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the American operation to a non-Chinese government-linked owner or be banned nationally, The Washington Times reported Thursday.

The report, produced by think tank China BioThreats Initiative, was written by Ryan Clarke, a strategic intelligence analyst, and L.J. Eads, a former Air Force intelligence officer.

The report reveals the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) plans to use TikTok’s short videos and other methods to influence young people about politics and military-support actions.

“The recent findings by the Justice Department align with our research, which reveals that the CCP strategically targets Americans, including college students, to push its ideological and political narratives,” Eads told The Washington Times.

“The CCP’s efforts to leverage platforms like TikTok to gather sensitive data and manipulate content reflect its broader goal of using discourse power to influence global public opinion.”

Last week, the Justice Department accused TikTok of harnessing the capability to gather bulk information on users based on views on divisive social issues like gun control, abortion, and religion.

Government lawyers wrote in documents to the federal appeals court in Washington that TikTok and its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance used an internal web-suite system called Lark to enable TikTok employees to speak directly with ByteDance engineers in China.

TikTok employees used Lark to send sensitive data about U.S. users, information that has wound up being stored on Chinese servers and accessible to ByteDance employees in China, federal officials said.

The open-source report said a 2022 study by Hu Liang-quan with the Propaganda and Traditional Warfare Department of Hunan University states that TikTok can be used to expand the channels for delivering ideological education to Americans born in the 1990s, a key demographic target.

A 2023 report from the School of Marxism at Hefei University of Technology said China’s worldwide power will be enhanced through promoting cultural and ideological narratives.

“For TikTok, this could translate into a tailored approach where content is curated or suppressed based on strategic ideological priorities from Beijing, potentially manipulating public opinion inside the United States and possibly allied countries,” the open-source report said, The Times reported.

The Clarke-Eads report also said TikTok supports a key element of the Chinese military’s strategy of “three warfares”: public opinion warfare, psychological warfare, and legal warfare, commonly known as “lawfare.”

“The overlap between the Three Warfares doctrine and TikTok’s observed operations and techniques in the United States is perhaps the most noteworthy of all,” the report said, The Washington Times reported.

TikTok is believed to have roughly 170 million users in the U.S.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.

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