In June, BuzzFeed News released a bombshell report about TikTok. Engineers in China had repeatedly accessed the data of American users, contradicting the company’s claims that its U.S. team had effective control over that information. TikTok had been caught in many lies before, but this story, which cited recordings of more than 80 internal conversations among TikTok employees throughout 2021 and this year, validated the doubts that national-security professionals and top U.S. officials have raised. “I get my instructions from the main office in Beijing,” one data scientist was quoted as having said in January. Astoundingly, the report contradicted the October 2021 sworn Senate testimony of Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s policy chief, who had stated that a U.S.-based team “handles access to user data.”

In August 2020, Donald Trump issued executive orders banning TikTok; but federal courts subsequently blocked them. Then, in June 2021, Joe Biden revoked Trump’s order and instead set in place a wide-ranging process to review data-privacy regulations more generally. Since then, TikTok has found itself on the cusp of negotiating a lasting solution with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency panel, which effectively has the power to force ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell TikTok. But, with these latest revelations, the company’s detractors can once again highlight TikTok’s significant ties to the Chinese Communist Party. In the wake of the BuzzFeed story, lawmakers and other officials on both sides of the aisle swiftly initiated investigations, asked app stores to ban TikTok (thus far, unsuccessfully), and requested FTC and counter-intelligence probes.

That’s all fine and good, but narrowly focusing on data privacy risks missing the main point, which is TikTok’s subservience to the Chinese Communist Party.

If TikTok succeeds in its effort to set the terms of discussion over this latest controversy, that discussion will be restricted to the finer points of data security. TikTok argues that its new project to host certain categories of U.S. user data on servers in Texas owned by the software company Oracle should make everyone trust its assurances. Responding to a letter led by Marsha Blackburn (R., Tenn.), for example, CEO Shou Zi Chew admitted that Chinese engineers had accessed U.S. users’ data — but only according to a robust security process “overseen by our U.S.-based security team.”

Even if it were true, as TikTok claims, that it has never handed over such data, there is no guarantee that this will remain the case. And data transfers could also be done informally rather than according to Chinese law, given that ByteDance, according to the Wall Street Journal, hosts a police cybersecurity office in one of its Beijing offices. ByteDance and TikTok are so intertwined that Chew was simultaneously the latter’s chief and the former’s CFO before stepping down from the parent company last November. Former TikTok employees told CNBC that “nearly 100 percent” of their company’s software is developed by ByteDance; many said they simultaneously had Byte-Dance email addresses.

ByteDance’s collaboration with Chinese security organs is far from theoretical. ByteDance apps, such as Douyin, a TikTok-like platform available only in China, have long been vectors for content directed by the CCP. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) found in 2019 that ByteDance had signed agreements with the Xinjiang Internet Police and the Ministry of Public Security to disseminate Chinese party-state propaganda that denied or minimized atrocities against Uyghurs. Chillingly, there were indications that those agreements would entail “offline cooperation” between ByteDance and Xinjiang police departments, though it’s unclear exactly what that means.

The Party’s proclivities have found their way onto TikTok, too. Famously, in 2019, TikTok censored a teenage girl’s video highlighting the party’s mass detention of Uyghurs. After an uproar, executives apologized, with one admitting that TikTok’s previous content-moderation algorithm had specifically censored Uyghur-related content. But she walked that back a day later in writing, claiming that any censorship of such content had been made by a since-abandoned policy banning videos about “conflict.”

What’s attracted less media coverage is the extent to which these problems have not been fixed, according to a different ASPI report, from 2021. The think tank’s researchers found that top TikTok videos on the search page for the “Xinjiang” hashtag promoted less popular videos featuring the party’s narrative — that the region is a peaceful place, rather than the site of mass atrocities — all while down-ranking videos with labels such as “Free Uyghur.”

This all makes sense given that the party’s ties to ByteDance are embedded in the company’s structure. The China-focused ByteDance subsidiary that operates Douyin was forced last year to sell a 1 percent stake to the Chinese government and grant it one of its three board seats. TikTok, in its usual way, has sidestepped the question of the CCP’s remarkable grip on ByteDance. Since the news of the sale wasn’t “relevant” to TikTok, spokeswoman Hilary McQuaide told the Washington Post, the company would not comment. Of course the development was relevant to TikTok, which, per its privacy policy, is permitted to collect biometric information, such as face prints and voiceprints, and to share that information with its affiliates.

ByteDance has an internal Chinese Communist Party committee, which convenes employees to study party doctrine — employees pose for pictures at events, hoisting the party’s hammer- and-sickle flag. The members of the committee have pledged their allegiance to the party and have hosted internal events to study and discuss the promotion of party doctrine. Such committees may be standard in most major Chinese firms these days, but that does not make them innocuous.

And, remarkably, ByteDance has linked itself to Beijing’s sophisticated united-front system, through which the party influences nonmembers in China and attempts to undermine foreign democracies and influence people around the world. A ByteDance board member, Neil Shen of Sequoia Capital China, has a seat on the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, which acts as a convening body for key players in the united-front network, including academics, ethnic-minority leaders, and business figures loyal to the party. These ties have granted ByteDance prestige among CCP elites. When the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce released a list of China’s top 100 entrepreneurs in 2018, ByteDance’s founder and former CEO, Zhang Yiming, was included on it. That’s more a political stamp of approval than a business trophy. The All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce answers to the United Front Work Department, which was reported by the Paper, a state-backed news website, to have steered the selection process.

ByteDance’s enmeshment in China’s political-influence system alone should be setting off alarms in Washington. TikTok directly employs a team of a dozen or so lobbyists — most of them former congressional aides from one party or the other — who carry out this work. Their efforts ultimately benefit an entity embedded in the heart of the political-influence ecosystem of the Chinese party-state. After serving the American people, the lobbyists now answer to a CCP-endorsed tech giant that peddles prison-camp propaganda.

While an outright ban on TikTok currently looks unlikely, U.S. officials can take further steps to convey why the social-media site is objectionable. This starts with acknowledging TikTok’s foreign-disinformation and political-influence campaign for what it is. Pressuring the American lobbyists and public-affairs staffers who work for TikTok to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) would subject them to mandatory disclosures about the officials and journalists with whom they speak, and about other critical details of TikTok’s foothold in the U.S. The Biden administration ought to also consider other tools, besides directing the chronically under-resourced Justice Department FARA unit to focus on TikTok, to address ByteDance’s complicity in the Uyghur atrocities. Meanwhile, members of Congress could investigate ByteDance’s united-front links, in addition to the data-privacy issue.

So far, TikTok executives have never comprehensively accounted for their employer’s rank subservience to a hostile foreign power. That ought to change.