Prof. Alan Rozenshtein Quoted in The Harvard Gazette About the TikTok Law Ban and its Implications

Professor Alan Rozenshtein was quoted in The Harvard Gazette about the implications of the TikTok law banning the app that is currently on a 75-day pause. Prof. Rozenshtein said the law was far from perfect but he generally supported the law Congress passed last year, noting that TikTok, which specializes in playing personalized series of short videos, could harvest a huge amount of information on its 170 million American users for counterintelligence purposes. And the Chinese government, through ByteDance, could pressure TikTok, which is algorithmically driven, to modify its algorithms in ways that would be adverse to America’s interests. He said that there may be no smoking gun yet about the potential national security threat posed by the social media app, “but the gun is assembled, it’s loaded, it’s on the table, and it’s pointed. You’re much closer to this nightmare scenario than you might expect.”