The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using TikTok to wage unrestricted warfare on the United States by indoctrinating American youngsters with the Chinese regime’s values, according to Casey Fleming, CEO of intelligence, strategy, and cybersecurity firm BlackOps Partners.
“Social media is a tool in their war chest. So they use it as an intelligence weapon, and also a cognitive weapon to distribute propaganda, to change your children’s values and your values into much more stronger values toward the CCP, and against Americans, or against the left or against the right, or Democrats or Republicans, or black or white, to start to stir up that infighting,” Fleming told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.
According to Fleming, TikTok is one of the tools used in the unrestricted warfare that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is waging against America.
“Any social media coming out of China, in fact, any type of technology—computers, hardware, software, digital cables, accessories, and so on, even appliances—those are intelligence-collecting weapons, because they are engaged in this thing called unrestricted warfare,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s TikTok, or whether it’s Shein, the number two app right now in the United States, or whether it’s Temu, which is the number three app and, also, the Amazon Killer, and also Chinese gaming apps. And now on the horizon, we have Lemon8, which is supposedly the TikTok replacement if the U.S. government bans TikTok,” he added.
Shein has operation centers in several major global markets, including Singapore, China, and the United States, and is now serving clients in over 150 countries, according to its website.
Temu, an online marketplace, was founded in Boston in 2022 by PDD Holdings Inc., which also operates Pinduoduo in China.
Nefarious Intentions
Fleming pointed to Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-Mass.) comment that TikTok is not the only social media platform that poses a threat to our nation’s children and teens, but that western Big Tech companies also have a case to answer.Fleming agreed that American Big Tech and social media giants also collects users’ data, but that they do it primarily to increase profits.
“The U.S. has social media, and they collect data on kids and parents and anybody using social media. It’s really to exploit our kids. They do brain hijacking, and it’s all about a dopamine cycle of all the clicks that they do,” he said.
“And it’s really all about profits, because for those companies it’s all about profits and market share.
“There’s really not a nefarious intent behind the United States’ [companies]—other than making too much money and gaining too much market share from a monopoly standpoint, and the harm that it actually does to the children,” he added.
Meanwhile, Fleming believes that Chinese social media has ill intentions towards American children.
“The harm that it causes is this brain highjacking. It changes their values. It causes infighting, antisocial behavior, it changes their thinking, it limits their critical thinking capability, it increases their anxiety, their depression, their suicide,” he said.
Their aim is to make “our children think that the CCP or China is a friendlier, better country than their own United States,” he said.
“There is no difference between the U.S. and China, the CCP, other than the nefarious use as a war tool, a tool in the war chest, by the CCP. With the U.S., you’re still being exploited—it’s still digital fentanyl that’s being exploited for money and profit share,” he said.
He singled out Lemon8, the social media app that is also owned by Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company.
Bytedance is reportedly calling on American users to turn to Lemon8 as a substitute for Tiktok.
Fleming said that “you have to assume Lemon8 is also a weaponized application, because it’s coming from the CCP.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to Bytedance for comments.
Replace China’s Trojan horse
As U.S. lawmakers are dancing around the issue of censorship and First Amendment freedoms in relation to a potential ban on TikTok, Fleming noted that America is already in the midst of what he described as World War 3.“So it’s a wartime environment. We’re going to have to suffer some contractions, some changes. Because if we’re going to win this war, we have to understand that these guys are using a Trojan horse against our families, our children, our companies, and so on,” he said.
Fleming suggested that the United States can join with its allies to create platforms that can replace the malicious Chinese apps.
“What I‘d like to see is other countries step up in the free world, like the UK, Canada, Australia, and all of our other allies, to say, ‘Look, we’re in this. So we’re going to be doing technology together with these platforms to replace these nefarious platforms that are coming in as Trojan horses,’” Fleming said.
The Epoch Times has reached out to Bytedance for comment, but had not received a reply before this article was published.
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