‘This Might Be the End’: TikTok Showdown Reaches Fever Pitch with CEO’s Congressional Testimony
Washington is closer to cracking down on the app, but the company is mobilizing its users to oppose a ban.
Washington is closer to cracking down on the app, but the company is mobilizing its users to oppose a ban.
T ikTok’s last major chance to fight off an impeding U.S. regulatory crackdown on its presence in the U.S. might come on Thursday, when TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appears before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., an inter-agency government panel, rejected TikTok’s compromise solution of setting up purportedly secure data centers through the American software company Oracle, after the Justice Department and Pentagon declined to get on board with the plan, dubbed Project Texas. Instead, the committee reportedly told TikTok parent ByteDance to sell the app.
That, combined with brewing bipartisan support in Congress for a legislatively imposed TikTok ban, means that Chew — a former CFO of ByteDance — will face some tough questions.
“No one is really sure what’s going to happen to TikTok, and if this hearing goes badly for the CEO, this might be the end,” Geoffrey Cain told National Review. Cain, a senior fellow at the Lincoln Network tech-policy think tank, testified before the Senate next to TikTok’s COO last fall and has written extensively about TikTok.
Cain cautioned, though, that Chew can succeed if he gives evasive yet plausible answers, and if representatives repeat broad questions that have been posed in the past; a successful performance by Chew could hold off Congress and CFIUS, granting TikTok an effective reprieve. Cain added that, despite the recent reports, he’s not sure the CFIUS divestiture order is a done deal.
Congressional frustration with TikTok has soared in recent months, as new reporting led by BuzzFeed and Forbes has revealed that engineers in China have repeatedly accessed U.S. users’ data and that they’ve used the app to spy on U.S. journalists’ locations.
Those revelations fueled the passage of a provision in last year’s omnibus spending package to ban TikTok from all federal-government devices — reflecting similar moves by dozens of state governments and earlier moves by other countries’ governments to do the same. And they’ve made legislation banning TikTok more likely to succeed.
Earlier this month, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a proposal along party lines led by Representative Michael McCaul (R., Texas) that would mandate stringent sanctions against social-media companies with roots in China and in other U.S.-adversary countries.
Meanwhile, Senators Mark Warner (D., Va.) and John Thune (R., S.D.) have pushed the RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan measure that codifies and grants new powers to a regulatory framework overseen by the Commerce Department. The White House has endorsed the legislation, though critics such as Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) argue that it will only give President Biden an option that he already has — to ban the app — thus relieving him of the political pressure to do so. Rubio and Senator Angus King (I., Maine) are pushing a third bill that would lead to an outright ban on TikTok and similar apps similarly connected to the Chinese government. Warner, however, has said that he’s extremely concerned by TikTok and that President Trump was right to try to ban the app in 2020.
House Republicans have yet to coalesce around any single TikTok-ban bill, and House Energy and Commerce chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R., Wash.) is consulting with GOP leadership about the path forward.
TikTok’s sizeable lobbying team, meanwhile, has made noticeable missteps and failed to disarm congressional hostility toward the company.
ByteDance’s top in-house lobbyist, Michael Beckerman, has drawn ire from Republicans over his answers about TikTok’s China ties, sparking viral moments. One came in a 2021 hearing when Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) grilled him over a potential data transfer to a ByteDance subsidiary that has a Chinese-government official on its board. Another viral moment flared in December when Beckerman flubbed questions from a CNN host about the Chinese government’s atrocities against the Uyghurs.
In one 2020 meeting, congressional staffers asked Beckerman about TikTok’s removal of a teenager’s video on Chinese-government atrocities against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. According to GOP aides at the meeting, Beckerman answered that the video had been censored under TikTok’s policy against posting terrorism-related content.
One of the aides noted that the Washington Post reported that a Chinese ByteDance subsidiary had inked a deal with the Xinjiang Internet Police to promote CCP propaganda about Xinjiang. In reply, Beckerman made a comment about countering al-Qaeda, shocking the aides. Beijing has justified its campaign to eradicate the Uyghurs by citing concerns about terrorism. Beckerman also called the Australian Strategic Policy Institute — the think tank that published a research report that informed the Post article — fake and not credible. “He was essentially perpetuating CCP talking points on the Uyghurs,” one of the aides told NR.
After this article was first published, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter responded to NR’s request for comment rejecting that recounting of the meeting, citing the recollections of Beckerman and another staff member. She asserted that, to the contrary, Beckerman had only “explained that a video related to the Uyghurs was moderated as ‘terrorism’ content because it included an image of Osama bin Laden.”
TikTok CEO Chew is seen as a savvier player, however.
“He does have a charming, amiable demeanor, and he’s someone people feel like they can get along with,” said Cain, who has interviewed TikTok employees and has an understanding of internal company dynamics.
“I think that that’s why TikTok hired him. He doesn’t have much actual decision-making power at the company,” Cain added.
In the past several weeks, before the CFIUS divestiture order came about, Chew had been on his own charm offensive, meeting members of the Energy and Commerce Committee to sell Project Texas.
When asked at one meeting whether the CCP can use TikTok to promote its narrative, Chew dodged, according to a House aide who was present. TikTok would lose users, Chew reportedly said, if it promoted Chinese propaganda, so it has an incentive not to do so. Moreover, Chew stressed, the app places labels on state media and bans political advertising.
But in the wake of reports about the divestiture order, Chew’s strategy seems to have shifted. Rather than reassuring lawmakers, he now seems intent on turning TikTok’s vast user base into a political battering ram. TikTok now has 150 million American users, he announced in a video posted to the platform on Tuesday.
“Some politicians have started talking about banning TikTok. Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you,” Chew said, with the U.S. Capitol visible in the background.
Shou Zi Chew, TikTok CEO, test-drives his congressional testimony:
– Your voters love TikTok
– Some of your constituents work for TikTokUnfortunately for TikTok, Americans don’t like being lied to or spied on by the Chinese Communist Party.pic.twitter.com/wDnNGWMi8o
— Michael Sobolik (@michaelsobolik) March 21, 2023
That tracks with reports that TikTok has paid for dozens of its top creators to travel to Washington ahead of the hearing to speak out against the ban. On Wednesday evening, Representative Jamaal Bowman (D., N.Y.) will hold a press conference with a group of TikTok influencers — almost certainly those referenced in the reports on this strategy — who say that a ban would negatively affect their livelihoods.
“They clearly recognize that they cannot convince the Biden administration, the various national-security agencies, or Congress that TikTok is not an immediate threat to American interests and national security,” an Energy and Commerce Committee staffer told reporters this week, previewing the hearing.
“Instead, they’re pivoting to attempt to use the court of public opinion and TikTok’s popularity with younger generations to try to make it politically toxic to ban the app,” the staffer added.