The comedian and podcast host, 55, shared his thoughts and theories on the latest episode of The Joe Rogan Experience with his guest, comedian Bridget Phetasy.
The safety of TikTok users has been discussed multiple times since its rise to prominence in the last few years.
In August 2020, President Trump signed an order attempting to ban TikTok in the interest of national security. While claims have been continuously made against the parent company ByteDance, it has consistently denied that it shares user information with third-parties.
In August, intelligence expert Michael Lammbrau wrote for Newsweek, describing TikTok as “China’s Trojan Horse” in America.
“It’s Chinese spyware, " Phetasy said of TikTok during a conversation about social media on The Joe Rogan Experience.
“It’s Chinese spyware,” Rogan agreed.
“Why are we letting people put this on their phones?” Phetasy asked.
“It should be banned.” Rogan said. “I’m saying this because I talk to security experts. It’s dangerous.”
He went on to accuse ByteDance of using TikTok to target the location of specific American citizens, including Chinese dissidents.
As well as being accused of sharing user information and even locations, TikTok has also faced multiple accusations of spreading false information. Newsweek investigated these claims in March 2022 with a Misinformation Monitor.
“I’ve talked to security experts, and they explained the whole system of how it works.” Rogan said of the inner workings of TikTok.
Phetasy added that through TikTok, China is “breaking the brains of our youth and turning them into pudding.”
Rogan also went on to accuse the Chinese governments of sending their citizens to colleges across the U.S. on fact-finding missions.
“They have a super-sophisticated system of infiltrating universities, because we have an open society, so because of our open society, they send, basically, employees of the Chinese government over here to get educated,” Rogan said.
“They get educated and they infiltrate universities and they find out all of this research that’s been going on, in whatever category, in whatever thing, and then they take all that stuff back to China.”
Rogan added: “We fuel their progress through innovation that takes place in America.”
In July 2022, during a speech about the espionage threat posed by Beijing, a chief at Britain’s intelligence agency MI5 said that 50 Chinese students had left U.K. universities in the past three years after tighter restrictions were made.
U.K. newspaper The Guardian reported that Ken McCallum, director general of MI5, said the agency had doubled its efforts against Chinese spy activity in a joint warning with the FBI.
He was speaking alongside Christopher Wray, director of the FBI. “We consistently see that it is the Chinese government that poses the biggest long-term threat to our economic and national security,” Wray said.
