TikTok CEO gets lit up in US Senate
Platform accused by Republican backbenchers of propaganda, espionage. ‘Tool of Communist Party’.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared on a panel with other social media chief executives, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 31.
The big tech leaders took a fair amount of heated questioning from senators who are considering revisions to the ‘Section 220’ liability shield that prevents social media companies from being sued. But TikTok’s Chew was singled out by Republicans for a particularly vituperative line of attack.
Senators cited China’s new national security law that requires Chinese companies to cooperate with intelligence agencies in China to attack Chew’s credibility and suggest TikTok is a propaganda and espionage tool of the Beijing.
The hearing was both a measure of US lawmakers’ broader frustration with the impunity and power of big social media platforms and the growing distrust and hostility toward China.
Calling TikTok “basically an espionage arm for the Chinese Communist Party,” Senator Josh Hawley, a first-term Republican from Missouri, said the platform should be banned in the US.
TikTok “is subject to the control and inspection of a foreign hostile government that has been actively trying to track the information and whereabouts of every American that may get their hands on,” Hawley said.
Senator Tom Cotton, a second-term Republican from Arkansas, went full McCarthyite on Chew (who is Singaporean) and insinuated the Biden administration has failed to ban the platform for political reasons.
“Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” Cotton demanded in a series of rapid-fire questions
“What happened at Tianamen Square in June of 1989?”
“Do you agree … that the Chinese government is committing genocide against the Uyghur people?”
“What we have here, we have a company that's a tool of the Chinese Communist Party, that is poisoning the minds of America's children -- in some cases driving them to suicide -- and that at best the Biden administration is taking a pass on, at worst may be in collaboration with,” Cotton proclaimed.
Liberal commentators on Twitter (X), slammed Cotton for his over-aggressive approach.
Katie Phang, a legal commentator for the US television news outlet MSNBC tweeted at Senator Cotton, “Not all Asians are Chinese and we aren’t all secretly members of the “Chinese Communist Party”.
TikTok is a video sharing app with 170 million US users that is owned by Chinese internet company ByteDance Ltd. It has been accused of providing data on American users to Chinese government officials. TikTok denies this but has moved its US data to a cloud infrastructure managed by Oracle and formed a 2,000-person team to wall-off the data from the rest of the company.
Former President Donald Trump had threatened to ban TikTok in 2020 and FBI Director Chris Wray has warned Congress the app could potentially be used to spy on Americans or conduct propaganda campaigns in the US.
Chew sought to rebut the senators’ accusations, pointing out that ByteDance is a globally owned company, and asserting the Chinese government has never asked for, nor received data from TikTok.
TikTok’s operations are currently under review in the US by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), an interagency group. A draft agreement with ByteDance reportedly would give US agencies broad oversight of the company’s US operations.
TikTok is popular with younger users in the US and the company has been running a high-profile television advertising campaign featuring people who have launched successful enterprises or public service organizations using TikTok.
Meanwhile, a group of lawmakers in the Senate last year proposed legislation that would enhance the president’s ability to ban TikTok, which is seen as limited in the CFIUS process.
— William Roberts