What we know — and don’t know — about the alleged national security concerns surrounding TikTok and WeChat.

That largely comes down to the fact that TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance.

Several cybersecurity experts told Recode that the app could pose a risk — if indeed the Chinese government forced TikTok to share data.

So it’s not a complete stretch to consider how certain TikTok users could be exploited — say, a defense contractor who uses TikTok for fun but whose phone could have other hackable, sensitive data on it.

And last week, he issued an executive order that threatens to ban the popular messaging app WeChat, owned by the Chinese mega-company Tencent.

The first is the US government’s concern that the Chinese government could force companies like TikTok’s ByteDance to surveil Americans.

For years, the Chinese government has banned major US tech companies like Facebook and Google from doing business in the country, and now the US is starting to reciprocate by banning Chinese apps.

But whether the risks are small or significant, the recent debates over what to do with TikTok and WeChat are part of what some are calling a new cold war between China and the US, with the US positioning itself as the moral leader upholding an internet that adheres to values of free speech, in contrast to the Chinese Communist Party, which regularly enforces strict censorship online.

Trump has accused ByteDance and other Chinese tech companies like WeChat of posing serious threats to US national security.

The concern is that TikTok could funnel American users’ personal data to the Chinese Communist Party, “potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” according to Trump’s recent executive order?

(TikTok has said that it collects less data than its competitors, like Facebook and Google, because it doesn’t track user activity across devices, which both companies do.).

But aside from the specifics of what TikTok does and doesn’t track, politicians like Trump are worried that, ultimately, TikTok is beholden to the Chinese government.

And the Chinese government has broad authority, significantly more so than the US government does, to snoop on users’ data as it pleases.

The company says it stores American user data on servers in the US and Singapore, which ostensibly would make it harder for the Chinese government to tap into.

“There’s no publicly available evidence that TikTok has ever done anything wrong,” said Segal, “but the concern is that because the Chinese National Intelligence Law of 2017 says any Chinese company can be drafted into espionage, a company could be forced to hand over the data.”.

And there doesn’t seem to be much TikTok can do — other than sell to a US company like Microsoft, which is the frontrunner out of a few major US companies that are reportedly in talks to buy TikTok’s US operations.

A second area of concern is that apps like TikTok and WeChat censor content that the Chinese Communist Party disapproves of.

The report also found that WeChat was analyzing messages sent by international users, including those in the US, to scan for and block politically sensitive content before it could circulate among Chinese users.

Last year, internal company documents showed TikTok was instructing its staff to moderate content in line with the Chinese government’s censorship of topics like the Tiananmen Square massacre and Free Tibet, according to leaked guidelines published by the Guardian.

But these guidelines were part of broad rules against controversial discussions on international politics across countries, so there’s no explicit proof that this was a directive from the Chinese government to TikTok.

The US government’s restrictions also rolled back Huawei’s plan to manufacture equipment to build out a massive 5G internet network in the US, which the Trump administration worried the company could use to intercept data on behalf of the Chinese government.

Last April, the US government undid a deal that had sold the popular dating app Grindr to Chinese owners, citing national security concerns.

Many US WeChat users use the app to communicate with family overseas in China, where many other communication apps like Skype and WhatsApp are blocked.

But regardless of what happens with WeChat and TikTok, the Trump-China tech war will likely continue.

Several analysts told Recode that some of the concern about TikTok and other Chinese technology companies is valid.

She said she understands the Trump administration’s concern that TikTok could be used as a Chinese spy app — but she isn’t convinced.