TikTok is part of China’s cognitive warfare campaign
Translated Chinese military reports suggest that warfare is shifting from destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent’s mind. Making the Biden administration’s call for TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell their stakes in the app or face a US ban just the start of a protracted Whac-a-Molegame in a broader strategy to combat cognitive warfare – with the human mind as the battlefield.
While a TikTok ban may take out the first and fattest mole, it fails to contend with the wider shift to cognitive warfare as the sixth domain of military operations underway, which includes China’s influence campaigns on TikTok, a mass collection of personal and biometric data from American citizens and their race to develop weapons that could one day directly assault or disable human minds. We ignore this broader context at our peril.
In November 2020, François du Cluzel, a project manager at Nato Act Innovation Hub, issued a report entitled Cognitive Warfare, identifying the human domain with nations racing to weaponize neuroscience. The US government has blacklisted Chinese institutes and firms it believes to be working on dangerous “biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses”, including “purported brain-control weaponry”. The Chinese People’s Liberation army (PLA) is investing heavily in cognitive domain operations, including AI research in brain-inspired software, hardware and decision making.
Nathan Beauchamp-Mustafaga, a China specialist at the RAND Corporation, calls this nothing less than an “evolution in warfare, moving from the natural and material domains – land, maritime, air, and electromagnetic – into the realm of the human mind”. The PLA, he says, hopes to “shape or even control the enemy’s cognitive
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