As divided as the American representatives are, they faced the CEO of video app TikTok on Thursday. One after the other Democratic or Republican delegate after another gave Director Shou Zi Chew a beating in a hearing. In him they found the symbol of the two things that they all view equally negatively: China and ‘Big Tech’, the big technology companies that have profoundly changed society and the public debate.
The hearing was the culmination of a campaign against TikTok as a “spy weapon,” as one of the Republican delegates called it. In recent weeks, the Democratic Biden administration has taken action against the company that serves 110 million American and more than a billion global users with its video platform. For example, civil servants must remove the app from their work phone. Government officials in the Netherlands received the same advice this week, after intelligence service AIVD warned of an “increased espionage risk” – not exclusive to TikTok, by the way.
President Biden is threatening a blanket ban on TikTok unless it separates itself from parent company ByteDance, a Chinese company operating under Chinese law. The hearing in the House of Representatives made repeated references to some provisions of a 2017 Chinese law that requires companies to transfer personal data relevant to national security to the Chinese government. The American representatives see this as a “back door” through which Beijing can look into the data of American users.
‘No evidence seen yet’
CEO Chew opposed the suggestion. When asked by a deputy if all the governments and intelligence agencies concerned are wrong in warning that China has access to TikTok users’ data, Chew said they are “mostly hypotheses” and that he has “seen no evidence yet.” that the Chinese government is actually watching.
If he had time to answer the barrage of questions at all, he bypassed ByteDance and TikTok’s ownership relationships. “There are five people on the board of directors, three of them are Americans.” Deputies pointed to a publication the Wall Street Journal of Wednesday, in which the Chinese government said it would thwart a US-forced sale of TikTok as an unwanted export of essential technology. This reasoning is reminiscent of the motivation with which the Netherlands recently decided that chip machine manufacturer ASML should not be allowed to do business with China unimpeded.
Several delegates asked about disinformation and videos with dubious content, such as a virtual “suffocation” contest or suicide incitements, and TikTok’s action to remove them. Others asked about posts offering hard drugs or asking for help with people smuggling. But most of the attention has been focused on TikTok’s ties to the Chinese government and the possibility that it is using the app, which is popular among young people, to collect data about users and use it for “blackmail, espionage and even tracking troop movements,” as one deputy said.
Is China watching? These are “mainly hypotheses,” says director Shou
Chew’s line of defense consisted of the promise that TikTok has plans (project Texas) to house “all data” of US users on a US server, owned by Oracle. He also offered to offer TikTok’s source code and algorithms to third parties for inspection. “That is more transparent than what any other tech company does,” says Chew.
The delegates paid little heed to Chew’s objections. They pointed out previous promises that had not been fulfilled and reports exposing the surveillance of TikTok users. When he said that TikTok is no worse than other tech companies, they replied that they had objections to those other companies as well.
Summit in Moscow
That same day, American newspapers reported on the two-day summit of Chinese President Xi Jin Ping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Underlining the warm relations, they released a nine-page statement, which said, among other things, that Russia and China “resist the use of ideology to draw borders, oppose the hypocritical narrative of so-called ‘democracy against authoritarianism’ , and oppose the use of democracy and freedom as an excuse to put pressure on other countries and politics”.
The New York Times summed it up as “us against the Americans.”
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