Information is everywhere, Insight is priceless

A big, social media howl went up back in April after President Biden signed a divest-or-ban bill on China-backed TikTok platform. Despite the teeny-bopper vibe, the howl wasn’t the shriek of a teenage girls but, according to several lawmakers, largely came from middle-aged men. That may be its own national security threat, but for a raft of unrelated reasons.

Bytedance, TikTok’s owner – itself closely tied to the Chinese government – has sued the US government over the bill, and on 16 September will have its day in court. Although, the company had no intention of waiting so long to kick start their influencer blitz including a streaming campaign to remind Americans how great TikTok is for the influencer economy. While it may sway the public mood, it isn’t much of a legal argument. In fact, the social platform is making Washington’s case for it.

ByteDance’s legal challenge is built around the First Amendment, emphasizing that TikTok is a unique platform that plays a significant role in the lives and professions of 170 million Americans. Forcing a sale, the company argues, would infringe on free speech.

This is more emotional flatulence than legal reasoning: First, TikTok is the fifth largest social media platform – all of which wildly imitate each other, so “unique doesn’t enter into it. Second: None of these platforms present any real barriers to entry, presenting no hardship to migrate platforms. Third, while the constitution does protect the right to free speech, it is not in the business of guaranteeing a zippy video publisher for said speech.

Bytedance’s legal argument was one born on social media – impassioned but fails to wrap around the actual case against it. The government is not banning specific accounts, but an entire platform on national security grounds. Where the challenge does have a point is that much of the government’s case relies on classified evidence that Bytedance can’t see and therefore can’t refute - short sheeting the company’s right to effectively refute the accusation. Here the company has a point, but national security threats have their own rationale. The raison d’etat against TikTok doesn’t stem from what is being said on the platform, but what is being collected by it, and by whom.  And just what do they plan to do with it.

The Art of War

Elites within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aren’t shy about their heaping contempt for America and its place in the world. That contempt is made bitter  by the type of resentment clever, hardworking students tend to have for the big, dumb jock who walks off with the cheerleader every Friday. There is a feeling – advanced by the first Chinese Emperor in about 221 BC and pretty much baked into the cultural framework for the intervening 2,235 or so years – that China was the Middle Kingdom between the heavens and earth and, as you might imagine, the pinnacle of human and cultural refinement. As such, the refinement of all societies are measured by their proximity to China. Chinese influence is the right side of history.

Which is to say that the elite have all read their Sun Tzu, know his dictums on phycological warfare and that the supreme excellence in war consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without actually fighting. This approach is counter-intuitive America’s straight-forward biggest-military-in-the-world approach, which as tensions rise, makes China’s cognitive warfare doctrine all the more dangerous. The stratagem predates the outward aggression of the current Xi Jinping regime by at least a decade, harkening back to – at least – the dawn of its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December of 2001.

In 2003, better than a dozen years before the founding of TikTok (and a year before Facebook), the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) released its Political Work Regulations, in which it outlined “three battles” China will have to conduct:

1) Public opinion warfare to influence domestic & international opinion,

2) psychological warfare to shock & demoralize enemy soldiers & civilians, and

3) legal warfare to gain international support through international & domestic law.

Around the same time, Chinese strategists were already discussing, a la Master Sun, the terrain of 21st Century warfare that includes the physical, the informational and the cognitive. In it’s yearly threat environment assessment, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) stated “China remains a complex intelligence concern”, an assessment backed up by the other members of the Five Eyes – the US, Canada, the UK and Australia.

Which brings us back to TikTok’s US media blitz where Bytedance and the Chinese Communist Party wants America to ask itself: What has any of this have to do with the average dancing teenage moron?

Perhaps more than you think.

Asymmetrical Warfare

Sun Tzu counseled strategic positioning and asymmetrical advantages to decide a battle before the enemy was engaged. A great deal of ink has been spilled on the corrosive effects of disinformation campaigns in society and their impact on free elections. These are well-documented so there isn’t no need to go into it here, save the crippling asymmetrical advantage that China has over the United States in this particular “terrain.” According to a recent report by the Economist Intelligence Unit: disinformation campaigns work best under four criteria: When the target country is

1) a democracy,

2) has a polarized electorate,

3) with a fragmented information ecosystem and

4) has global influence.

The United States, and most of her allies, ring all of these bells. China is vulnerable only on one – and they can trigger a media black-out at will. The effects of disinformation are telegraphed when a platform can move customers from users to activist or operatives.

General corrosive effects of disinformation aside, the directed deliverables of such campaigns are often limited. According to a recent story in the Wall Street Journal, a prolific influencer network with the Monty Pythonesque name of Spamaflague has been targeting both the Trump and the Harris presidential campaigns. One account, The Harlan Report – posing as a conservative US media outlet – had been most successful on TikTok before the platform took the account down. That, however, is not saying much, it didn’t hit viral traction anywhere. As a platform for delivering directed disinformation for a specific end, TikTok – or any social media platform – isn’t very effective because space is already uncontrollably chaotic. Where it does affect the “terrain” of cognitive warfare is the accumulated weight of intensified chaos and erosion of morale as heaps of disinformation are generated and thrown against the wall. The corrosion comes not from a specific idea or piece of misinformation, but from unrelenting sense of confusion.

As far as the national security threat from foreign controlled social media, fake news is the wrong end of the stick.

How to Recruit an Operative

In the Art of War, written during the Warring States period (c. 405-221 BC) that predated the first emperor, Sun Tzu uses the entire final chapter to explain the proper use of spies and outlines the five types – none of which infiltrate an enemy from the outside (although what we’d call disinformation is discussed). There is a good reason for this: It doesn’t work.

The premise of The Americans – about a family of Soviet sleeper agents living as Americans in the 1980s – is true enough. According to an operative who defected in the late eighties, the Soviets did run the program for about 20 years before giving it up after losing track of every single agent somewhere in the US.

Going native aside, there is the time and expense of learning a language, the accent, the right idiom and slang. Then there is the matter of mannerisms: Recall Michael Fassbender’s Archie Hicox in Inglourious Basterds getting his cover blown for ordering three whiskies in a decidedly un-German manner. Cliques, which are even harder to define, have their own codes. Does your man wear one of those copper golf bracelets, or a free-wheeling leather one? Or is he the sort who wouldn’t wear a bracelet on a bet? Humans use these heuristic cues to assess a kaleidoscope of clues about someone: insider or outsider, trust worthy or not. Unfortunately, humans aren’t any good at articulating, even to ourselves, what we’re actually assessing. No amount of forward planning can address a detail that can’t be expressed. Assuming you did get it all right the operative would still be a point of suspicion simply because they are, in fact, an outsider.

It’s much easier, cheaper and effective by an order of magnitude to simply recruit an existing insider to do your snooping or agitating. Even that takes a long time and entails a great deal of largely wasted effort. First you need to mark a potential asset and make contact. If you are lucky, the mark is drowning in debt or just killed a prostitute which makes blackmail simple and fairly straightforward. You don’t want to rely on that sort of luck.

Normally it takes time to establish trust and temperament before starting that series of small, innocuous steps that will stack up until it is too late and the mark is in a little too deep. Then you gently threaten exposure, with a pay-off to take the sting out of it. Effective, yes, but a time-consuming, labor-intensive pain littered with bad leads.

A repressive regime like the CCP can target the family members of first or second generation immigrants with strong ties to the old country. Or simple greed will do the trick. As in the case of Chines-born Linda Sun - former deputy chief of staff for New York Governor Kathy Hochul – who was arrested with her husband Chris Hu on 3 September 2024. The eight counts included conspiring as an illegal agent for China. In addition to millions of dollars in kickbacks for her husband, Sun’s family secured perks in the China. In return, she steered Chinese interests in New York through the state government, stymied Taiwan’s overtures, removed embarrassing details from speeches and ignored legal issues. In short achieving goals 1 and 3 of the PLA’s Political Work Regulations (see, The Art of War, pg. 2).

Both Sun and Chu, it bears noting, deny any wrongdoing.

Social Media: Bringing People Together

Now consider TikTok’s 170mm+American users. The platform skews young, but the most successful spy ring of all time, the Cambridge Five, were all spotted and recruited as teenage undergrads. To name three: Kim Philby became the MI6 liaison with the CIA in Washington, Don McLean, involved in creation of NATO, passed notes to the Moscow in nearly real time, and John Cairncross helped hand over plans for the atomic bomb to the Soviets. In the modern context, the elite universities from which Washington does most of its recruiting have developed a fashionable anti-Americanism.   

Some 170mm+ impressionable Americans log onto TikTok, often 20 or so times a day. Each visit they record their likes, dislikes, and bitch about their problems. Whatever else you think about social media, it is hard to argue that it isn’t devilishly good at pairing desires to users. The algorithm catalogs their worst fears as well.

Yet, you may well argue, everyone on social media is lying through their teeth. True, but that actually speeds up the process. While it’s counter-intuitive, all you get with the truth (if you can get it) is a statement of what is. A lie, more often than not, is aspirational wish-fulfillment. Something to bear in mind when assessing disinformation. Knowing someone’s deepest desires and dreams, to be a bastard about it, is to have leverage. Unless the truth involves a marital affair, embezzlement or the aforementioned dead prostitute, the lie will get you further.

TikTok – or any social media platform that collects user data – has the power to streamline and automate the vetting and grooming of insiders in seconds, as opposed to weeks, months or even years and is made more certain with every interaction, At that’s 170mm x 20 a day is cognitive warfare on a massive scale. Contact and establishing trust can be done on a massive, automated scale without looking like it’s being done at all. All backed by a hostile superpower that visualizes its inevitable showdown with America in historic, generational terms.

Hacking can be done from home, but eyes and ears need are needed to divine intention and peddle influence – what Sun Tzu called foresight.

Network Warfare

The Harlon Report was banned by TikTok after the Wall Street Journal called for comment – but this shouldn’t be taken as a good faith crack-down on fake news, but rather closing down an operation after its cover was blown. US Intelligence has been aware of thousands of affiliated accounts within the Spamaflague network operating in a complex network of overseas accounts across multiple platforms since 2019.

Lurking in the government’s case against TikTok is the documentation that China and the PLA have already gone full-in on disinformation, hacking and recruitment. This is where the networked structure of the social platforms kicks into high, potentially devastating, gear.

As users cluster and pre-existing beliefs (no matter how asinine) become more entrenched and self-evident, the network starts to take care of the grooming itself. The target’s problems are already out there, waiting for a targeted solution – just a simple favor from your friend on social media. Think Tindr for the potential foreign asset.

The dangers of pitting network warfare against hierarchal powers are evident in today’s burning conflicts: Consider that ISIS was never more vulnerable than when it held territory. The Lebanon-based Hezbollah, now that it is the de facto government in Lebanon, has a lot to lose. Yet Hamas and a scattered ISIS, both made up of self-correcting networks, are now wreaking havoc with near impunity.

That networked concept maps neatly onto stated PLA and the CCP cogitative warfare doctrine in the “terrain” of cyberspace. The phrasing here is important, with modern military documents reflecting the terminology of The Art of War  in concepts like terrain. Sun Tzu advises careful assessment of not only your strengths and weaknesses, but those of your enemy. So we’d do well to remember that in the area of cognitive warfare, not only do the weapons provide an asymmetrical advantage against the free West – we don’t really have an offense on this terrain.

So, our defense had better be good.

Takagi, Koichiro, The Future of China’s Cognitive Warfare Lessons From the War in Ukraine.War on the Rocks, 22 July 2022

Berman, Julien; Rozenshtein, Alan The TikTok Case Will Be Determined by What’s Behind the Government’s Black Lines Lawfare, 31 2024

Voltz, Dustin Beijing Backed Trolls Target US Voters as Election Nears, Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2024

Fanelli, James Former Aide to New York Gov. Hochul Charged With Acting As Chinese Agent. Wall Street Journal, 3 September 2024

Cramer, Lucy New Zealand says China remains complex intelligence concern. Reuters 3 September 2024

Richard Murff is the founder of the 4717 to provide lateral thinking on geopolitics, markets, and globalization in a world of consensus blindspots. His books include Haint Punch (novel), Drunk as Lords, Pothole of the Gods, and the upcoming World War III Has Started... Dress Accordingly.