I don’t believe TikTok is just a social media app—and that’s the problem.
The current uproar over TikTok’s ties to China, its data practices, and its influence on American users has been framed as a singular threat—a rogue platform operating outside acceptable norms. But that framing is convenient, not honest. TikTok didn’t invent mass surveillance, behavioral tracking, or algorithmic influence. It simply made the power of those systems impossible to ignore.
The truth is uncomfortable: TikTok is alarming because it looks foreign. Meta, Google, and Palantir are alarming because they look familiar.
TikTok and the Fear of Foreign Control
TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance places it under Chinese law, including national intelligence statutes that compel cooperation with state security services. That fact alone makes U.S. officials nervous, and rightly so. A platform with hundreds of millions of users, driven by an opaque and highly adaptive algorithm, represents an unprecedented tool for influence.
But the real concern isn’t that TikTok collects data. It’s that it controls attention.
The recommendation engine decides what rises, what disappears, and what never gains traction. That power—over culture, politics, and public emotion—is strategic. It doesn’t require espionage. It requires nudging behavior at scale.
That’s why TikTok is treated as a national security issue. Not because it spies, but because it shapes.
Meta and Google: The Domestic Surveillance Giants
Here’s where the hypocrisy becomes obvious.
Meta and Google have spent years perfecting the same surveillance mechanisms—often with more granularity than TikTok. They track users across devices, websites, physical locations, and social graphs. They ingest metadata, behavioral patterns, and inferred psychological traits, then monetize that intelligence at industrial scale.
Unlike TikTok, these companies operate under U.S. jurisdiction. But that doesn’t mean they operate independently of the state.
Both Meta and Google have well-documented histories of cooperating with government data requests, intelligence programs, and law enforcement partnerships—sometimes voluntarily, sometimes under legal pressure, often behind closed doors. Oversight exists, but it’s fragmented, slow, and routinely outpaced by technology.
If TikTok represents foreign influence, Meta and Google represent domestic normalization of surveillance.
Palantir: Where Data Meets Power
Then there’s Palantir—the company that makes the quiet part explicit.
Palantir doesn’t market itself to teenagers or advertisers. It sells data fusion platforms to governments, military agencies, and law enforcement. Its tools ingest massive, disparate data sets—social media activity, financial records, communications metadata, location data—and turn them into actionable intelligence.
This is where the pipeline becomes visible.
Data collected by platforms like Meta and Google doesn’t vanish into a vacuum. It feeds an ecosystem of brokers, analytics firms, and intelligence contractors. Palantir sits downstream, transforming raw data into predictions, associations, and risk profiles.
TikTok is feared because it might feed a foreign intelligence apparatus.
Palantir is powerful because it already feeds domestic ones.
The Real Issue: Control Without Accountability
What connects TikTok, Meta, Google, and Palantir isn’t nationality—it’s architecture.
All four rely on:
- Massive data extraction
- Behavioral modeling
- Algorithmic decision-making
- Minimal user transparency
- Weak democratic oversight
The difference is political framing. TikTok is treated as a threat because it sits outside U.S. control. The others are tolerated because they sit inside it—even when their capabilities are just as invasive.
This isn’t a privacy debate. It’s a power struggle.
Who controls the data?
Who controls the algorithms?
Who decides how influence is applied—and against whom?
Why Banning TikTok Misses the Point
A TikTok ban might reduce one vector of influence, but it doesn’t dismantle the system that made TikTok possible. It leaves intact an economy built on surveillance, persuasion, and predictive control—one dominated by corporations and quietly entwined with the state.
If TikTok disappears tomorrow, Meta, Google, and Palantir remain. The pipelines stay open. The incentives don’t change.
The danger isn’t that one platform knows too much.
The danger is that all of them do—and no one is meaningfully accountable.
Where I Land
TikTok didn’t create the surveillance age. It exposed it.
It forced a conversation about data, influence, and sovereignty that should have happened years ago. But that conversation can’t stop at China. If we only fear foreign surveillance while excusing domestic systems that operate at equal or greater scale, we’re not protecting freedom—we’re protecting control.
The real question isn’t whether TikTok is safe.
It’s whether we’re willing to confront a digital world where surveillance is the business model, influence is the product, and citizens are the raw material.
And so far, the answer hasn’t been encouraging.
