With TikTok Ban Now in Place, What About Communist China’s Other Apps Aimed at America’s Youth?

As President Biden prepares to sign into law legislation requiring Bytedance, a Communist Chinese technology company tied to Beijing, to divest from TikTok or cease the social media app’s American operations, the question arises: Who is next? What about China’s other apps and strategic investments in education technology? TikTok’s challenge skims the surface of a sea of concerns, all rooted in Beijing’s aim of a new global order.Consider other, more insidious Chinese-run apps. Gauth, formerly Gauthmath, is a tutoring app to help with homework. The so-called “AI Study Companion” is the third most popular education app in Apple’s app store, targeting primary and high school students. Initially centered on science and math, it now covers economics, literature, and the social sciences. Students capture images of difficult problems for Gauth to solve.So what? What’s the harm to a student using an app to solve an integral or parse Mark Twain? There are several. Yet, fundamentally, apps such as Gauth are one tool in China’s wider efforts to subvert and indoctrinate future American and global generations. The apps operate in tandem with other soft power strategies such as student associations, educational exchanges, and financial aid designed to mold educational content.For Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, youth “play a vanguard role in realizing national rejuvenation.” Mr. Xi’s vision of a new world order hinges on its endorsement by future leaders — or otherwise their ineptitude and inability to counter it. While in China then, TikTok’s algorithms promote largely educational content, in America we’re fed inane videos and harmful viral trends. Gauth often gets the homework wrong.When a people loses its ability to reason critically, as apps like Gauth and their kind discourage, it becomes more pliable and susceptible to control. To a great extent, that’s what we’re now seeing across American college campuses. Decades of political correctness, moral relativism, and what Jonathan Haidt terms intellectual “coddling,” have left a generation unable to parse fact from fiction, ensnared by a leftist ideology.How encouraging this must be for Beijing. Like the Marxists, Islamists, and their unwitting allies who have for years silently toiled to infiltrate and undermine American intellect, China, too, plays a long game. Should it fail to intellectually enfeeble us, Beijing hopes it might yet sway us to its ways. The implications of a China-owned app instructing on, say, American or world history, or democratic theory, would be vast.Not least because Beijing has its own interpretation of events. It contends, for instance, that “China was directly involved in designing and building the international order,” and democracy should reflect, in part, “the will of the state.” Since 2022, Beijing, through the Primavera Capital Group, has owned Tutor.com, an on-demand personal tutoring website. Tutor.com has contracts with K-12 schools, universities, and the Defense Department.Tutor.com for American Military Families is an online service funded by the Defense Department. It offers virtual homework aid and tutoring for American service members and their families. Given China’s ambitions, it’s conceivable that Beijing might leverage the platform to influence our troops, if it hasn’t already. Primavera Capital is tied to the CCP. It is invested in Bytedance.Gauth, too, is owned by Bytedance. The core issue with such apps is that they are tools for indoctrination and subversion wielded by an adversarial state. A secondary concern pertains to the known issue of data security. In its short-termism, the popular narrative has misaligned the sequence of these concerns. This is not to suggest data considerations do not matter — they do. Apps like Gauth could be used as instruments of espionage.Gauth utilizes a phone’s camera, allowing users to snap pictures of homework problems and feed it into its engine. Harmless enough. Yet it also requires access to a user’s entire photo library and location data. This is puzzling if the aim is to solve for ‘x’ or summarize Huckleberry Finn. Yet it makes sense if the objective is to establish “patterns of life,” to find connections between persons of interest, or to monitor military movements.Such functions inform Beijing’s strategy, the aim of which is to topple America and supplant its leadership with Xi Jinping’s new world order. Yet, over time, persons of interest may shift, new conflict domains might emerge, and the value of certain data might diminish. But a cohort of global leaders steeped in Xi Jinping Thought or so intellectually enfeebled as to be unable to resist it? Priceless.

With TikTok Ban Now in Place, What About Communist China’s Other Apps Aimed at America’s Youth?

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