A five-hour-plus congressional hearing Thursday showed U.S. lawmakers' concerns about TikTok are varied, with few easy answers on how to regulate its content or get straightforward answers on its business practices.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee called TikTok CEO Shou Chew to testify on TikTok’s consumer privacy and data security practices, the platform’s impact on minors, and its relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Shou tried to put a positive spin on what his company plans to do to allay the concerns, but under grilling from the congressional members Shou often sidestepped, even refusing to use yes-or-no responses as directed multiple times. The strategy did not go unnoticed by the politicians - at one point Rep. Tony Cardenas (D-Calif.) compared Shou to the late dancer Fred Astaire, a description that has also been used for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg – suggesting that Shou and other Big Tech leaders know how to dance around issues.
Committee Chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) addressed Shou's avoidance in answering questions and then spoke directly to the Americans.
“To the American people watching today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon (being used) by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see, and exploit for future generations,” Rodgers said at the hearing. “A ban is only a short-term way to address TikTok. A data privacy bill is the only way to stop TikTok from ever happening again in the United States.”
One point of contention focused on the differences between the content that appears on TikTok to U.S. users and what shows up on Douyin, the sister company that Chinese users can access. Several committee members asked why various content, whether it focused on violence or drug use, isn’t visible in China but is promoted in the U.S., which is also one of the initial concerns that TikTok is a vehicle for controlling U.S. viewers.
Although Shou stressed that TikTok is largely an entertainment platform, members pointed out that content in the past has been linked to teen deaths, carried threats of violence including against committee members, and more.
Shou, in his testimony, highlighted measures being taken at TikTok to safeguard user data, such as the Texas Project that allows TikTok to keep all U.S. user data secure under the purview of U.S. engineers at Oracle, and efforts to limit the type of content younger teens can access and for how long. Several committee members questioned whether that would be effective in limiting the alleged spying and sale of data that has been associated with TikTok and ByteDance.
Other committee members also questioned Shou’s credibility as a witness.
How much of a role the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has over TikTok and how the CCP might be using users' TikTok data for suspect reasons was not made clear in the hearing, as Shou answered few questions directly.
Shou was questioned over TikTok's allowing inappropriate content to be uploaded onto the platform, such as content that contains misinformation or promotes threats of violence. Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) cited a video depicting how to make a drug from grapefruit, which she discounted as false information; and Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) played content that showed a semi-automatic handgun being racked repeatedly while showing the names of congressional members, suggesting a threat against the lawmakers, that had been on the platform for at least 41 days.
Members of both parties indicated they want better regulation of TikTok and similar tech enterprises.
Committee members at times appeared frustrated with Shou and with the issue. More than 30 such hearings have been held, it was noted, and a common complaint is that the tech representatives insist they will take actual measures to address users' and lawmakers' privacy concerns but have not seemed to follow through with concrete actions.
Cammack summed up some of the general frustration echoed by other committee members on the matter by referencing the video threat to the committee members that had been on TikTok for 41 days despite promoting violence against House members.
“You couldn’t take action after 41 days when a clear threat, a very violent threat, to the chairwoman of this committee and the members of this committee was posted on your platform,” Cammack said. “You damn well know that you cannot protect the data and security of this committee or the 150 million users of your app because it is an extension of the CCP.”
In January, the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) issued a brief titled "Alarm Over TikTok Threat Reaches Critical Mass as Government Responds," which states that short-form video app TikTok is a subsidiary of ByteDance Ltd., which is based in Beijing and controlled by the CCP. The authors state TikTok "serves as an ingenious dataharvesting weapon for the CCP disguised as a social media platform and has become a dominant force in American youth culture.”
The AFPI brief referenced an October 2022 Forbes Magazine article stating TikTok developers had the ability and intention to track and target certain U.S. residents. The article highlighted at least two cases in which a TikTok internal audit team intended to track a U.S. citizen who had no relationship with the company. With a billion daily users, TikTok has come under scrutiny, as have U.S. social media platforms such as Facebook, but is also facing allegations of ties to the CCP, data theft and surveillance, and its business conduct.
A study of TikTok and its source code conducted by security research firm Internet 2.0 found that the app "aggressively and surreptitiously collects data" from users' devices, including a list of all other apps on the device, Wi-Fi network information (SSIDs), phone numbers and IP addresses, and GPS information. Internet 2.0's report asserts that all of this data is gathered at least once per hour, and TikTok can access and communicate with China-based servers owned by Guizhou Baishan Cloud Technology Co. Ltd.
