TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to testify on TikTok’s consumer privacy and data security practices, the impact TikTok has on children and the relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, according to Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers.
“Big Tech has increasingly become a destructive force in American society. The Energy and Commerce Committee has been at the forefront of asking Big Tech CEOs – from Facebook to Twitter to Google – to answer for their companies’ actions. These efforts will continue with TikTok. ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data,” Rodgers (R-WA), said in a press release on Jan. 30.
“Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms. We’ve made our concerns clear with TikTok. It is now time to continue the committee’s efforts to hold Big Tech accountable by bringing TikTok before the committee to provide complete and honest answers for people,” she said.
Short-form video app TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance Ltd., which is based in Beijing and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), according to an America First Policy Institute (AFPI) brief titled “Alarm Over TikTok Threat Reaches Critical Mass as Government Responds".
TikTok “serves as an ingenious data harvesting weapon for the CCP disguised as a social media platform and has become a dominant force in American youth culture,” the AFPI brief said. TikTok was the most downloaded app of 2020, three years after its launch, and gained much popularity during COVID. The app now boasts 1 billion daily users, who can consume content curated by a personalized algorithm on topics ranging from sports to beauty to politics.
A Forbes Magazine article from October 2022 found that TikTok developers have the capability and intention to track and target specific U.S. citizens, citing at least two cases where a TikTok audit team aimed to track someone with no connection to the company, the AFPI brief reported.
It quoted a November 2022 voluntary disclosure from ByteDance that allows certain TikTok employees remote access to European user data from corporate locations in Brazil, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea and the United States. The authors said that if this is also applicable to American TikTok users, their data "may be freely transmitted all over the world by TikTok with the approval of ByteDance for use by its employees, including those in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)".
This contradicts TikTok’s COO Vanessa Pappas’ September 2022 statement to the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee. ByteDance acknowledged in December 2022 that its employees had inappropriately accessed the data of American journalists in a bid to find the origin of a leak.
An Internet 2.0 study cited in the brief found that TikTok collects user data “aggressively and surreptitiously collects data.” The report said that this data is communicated with China-based servers owned by Guizhou Baishan Cloud Technology. The study suggests that TikTok gathers this data for the purpose of data harvesting, as the app can still run without collecting this information.
Total bans of TikTok from government devices are now in place in Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia, while partial bans have been enacted in Florida, Louisiana, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, the brief reported.
On the federal level, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Reps. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) introduced the “Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act” in December. The legislation would effectively ban TikTok in the U.S.
