China obliges national digital companies to work for Intelligence agencies, accelerating the technological “gap” with the US

On May 1, 2024, updated legislation on the “protection of state secrets” came into force in China. According to this law, digital companies, including Tencent, Weibo, ByteDance (owner of TikTok), DiDi, and Alibaba, must detect leaks of Chinese state and business secrets, immediately remove them, and participate in investigations of such cases on a par with the Chinese intelligence services.

In practice, this means that any Chinese platform, both national and global, will expand the methods of collecting user data for the Chinese Communist Party.