TikTok is not the benign source of entertainment and information that its audience of young fans believe they’re getting, Congressman Jared Moskowitz warns. Rather, he warns, it is a dangerous propaganda weapon that China is using to manipulate public opinion and divide Americans.

The intention and impact are so great, Moskowitz said, that TikTok amounts to a large-scale psychological operations effort by China. “I want to be clear: I don’t want to ban TikTok. But you have to recognize it’s a psyops weapon.”

How the U.S. deals with it — changes could be announced imminently — is a “huge” part of “how we’re going to control how propaganda gets fed to the American people,” Moskowitz said.

The Florida Democrat discussed TikTok and other implications of social media on an episode of “The Chuck Toddcast” podcast that dropped earlier this month. His comments came before this week’s developments, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant suggesting a TikTok deal is in the offing.

Deadlines for TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to sell its U.S. operations have come and gone before, with President Donald Trump granting multiple postponements. Trump issued another extension on Tuesday.

Trump has gone from a fierce critic of TikTok — he tried to shut it down in his first term — to a champion of the popular service. Trump reversed his position during his 2024 campaign to return to the White House.

Moskowitz comes to his views about TikTok and other social media platforms as an admittedly prolific user of social media himself — and as a father of two elementary-aged children he wants to protect from detrimental effects of social media platforms.

The congressman said his views on TikTok are more than simply his opinion. “There’s a reason why I’m not allowed to have it on my official devices,” he said.

TikTok didn’t respond to questions about Moskowitz’s comments. On a “myths vs. facts” page on its website, TikTok said the assertion that it “manipulates content in a way that benefits the Chinese government or harms American interests” is a myth. It countered the content manipulation allegation with “Fact: TikTok is an entertainment app. The content on TikTok is generated by our community. TikTok does not permit any government to influence or change its recommendation model.”

NBC News reported that an analysis of ByteDance ownership structure “argues that the company is deeply entangled with some of China’s major government propaganda organs.” TikTok said its parent company was “founded by Chinese entrepreneurs,” but isn’t headquartered in China and that CEO and board members don’t live in mainland China. Some of the board members are American, it said.

Moskowitz said other countries recognize the dangers of TikTok, citing India’s banning of the app.

And China doesn’t expose its citizens to the version of the app deployed in the U.S., he said. ByteDance operates a different subsidiary, Douyin, with similar vertical short videos in China. “China’s TikTok is not our TikTok,” Moskowitz said. “Theirs is an educational program. So they’re making their kids smarter, they’re making our kids dumber. They’re feeding our kids false information.”

TikTok labeled it a “myth” that “Douyin offers educational content, limits screen time, and creates a positive experience for teens, while TikTok does not. Fact: Douyin and TikTok are separate apps that are run by separate teams and serve separate markets.”

The Pew Research Center reported in 2023 that 39% of adults under 30 said they regularly get their news from TikTok, compared to just 3% of those 65 and older. Among teens, 58% said they were daily users of TikTok.

“What they’re doing, because China thinks in (timeframes of) 100 years, 1,000 years. What they’re doing is getting us addicted, getting it attached, setting the seeds, getting it fully ingrained in society,” Moskowitz said.

He said TikTok users report they often “don’t check a second source” for information they see on the app. That allows China to use TikTok to shape young people’s opinions in “whatever direction” they want by promoting certain information and hiding other information.

For example, he said, TikTok amplifies videos about Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza but suppresses videos about China’s oppression of the Uyghurs minority. “You ever hear about what the Chinese do to the Uyghurs on TikTok?” Moskowitz said. “Scrubbed from the platform, right? That’s how you do a psyops operation.”

Uyghurs in China are subject to atrocities, forced sterilization of young women, enforced separation of families, and detention of more than one million in detention and forced labor camps, according to the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at The George Washington University and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Moskowitz isn’t alone on his views of TikTok. In 2024, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Weston, described TikTok as “a horrific actor when it comes to the social media platforms.”

Congress, concerned that TikTok’s Chinese ownership makes it beholden to orders from that country’s government, voted overwhelmingly with bipartisan support in 2024 for a law that bans the app in the U.S. unless its parent sells TikTok to another company.

The contours of the latest possible deal haven’t yet been announced.

TikTok and some users sued to have the law overturned, arguing it was a violation of the First Amendment. A spokesperson said it amounted to “outright censorship of the American people.” But the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law, concluding that “Congress has determined that divestiture is necessary to address its well-supported national security concerns regarding TikTok’s data collection practices and relationship with a foreign adversary.”

China’s position heretofore has been “interesting,” Moskowitz said. “They were like, ‘no, no, we’re not going to sell it and make billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars.’ They were like, ‘We’re going to close it. We’d rather shut it down.”

The reason is that the Chinese didn’t want to part with the app’s source code, Moskowitz said. “Because if we get the source code, we can see what they’ve been doing. That’s why,” the congressman said.

Other apps

Moskowitz said his concerns aren’t confined to TikTok.

“Don’t get me wrong. Twitter or X is also a cesspool of hate and garbage,” he said. But that platform “at least” has the “community notes” feature, which TikTok doesn’t.

Community notes is a crowd-sourced program that allows users to add fact checks and other context to posts they find false or misleading.

Moskowitz said it’s hard for people to break the social media habit, himself included.

“It’s like trying to get a drug addict to stop taking drugs, right? We — we collectively, me included, so I’m not passing judgment on others — we are addicted to this,” he said, adding, “It’s tough to put the phone down. I deal with it all the time, trust me, I’m doom scrolling on Twitter too much.”

Still, he said, “trying to protect the kids” is essential.

“We all know what’s not good for 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds,” he said. He endorsed age-verification policies implemented by some states to control access to pornography. “Age verifications are great,” he said.

“We have to start trying to protect our kids right from being just totally sold everything as soon as they get onto the internet.”

Moskowitz said it’s being left to parents “to figure out how do we protect our kids until they’re adults? How do we protect our kids from being targets from companies or foreign governments who are very active on all of these platforms.”

A solution requires action from Washington, Moskowitz said. He also said reaching an agreement on appropriate regulation is exceedingly difficult. Tech firms are more powerful than the defense and health care industries, he said. “No question. They are 100% stronger.”

Moskowitz said his two young sons are “not on TikTok,” but are allowed on YouTube — with major parental oversight.

They can’t access the app in their bedrooms. “They’ve got to do it in the living room so I can at least hear some of the stuff.”

The boys are “getting pitched everything” when they’re on the app. At times he said he has had to “delete the app, try to reset the algorithms, try to clean it up.”

And, he said, his children are not allowed on during the week, just weekends. “That’s our rule in the house.”

But that doesn’t guarantee they’re not exposed to information parents don’t approve.

“Their friends are on it. I can’t keep them totally away from it. … They still learn stuff from other people, right? That’s stuff that’s not on their YouTube, but’s on their friends’ YouTube,” he said. “You can’t put your kids in a cocoon.”

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