During the hearing, virtually none of the committee’s members expressed support of ‘Project Texas,’ TikTok’s proposal to set up secure data centers.
TikTok isn’t happy with the high-profile bipartisan grilling to which Democrats and Republicans subjected company CEO Shou Zi Chew today. Immediately after Chew appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas accused lawmakers on the committee of xenophobia.
“We’re committed to providing a safe, secure platform, that fosters an inclusive place for our amazing, diverse communities to call home. It’s a shame today’s conversation felt rooted in xenophobia,” Pappas wrote.
While TikTok itself has previously refrained from accusing its congressional detractors as racist or xenophobic in official communications, a former U.S. intelligence community official who now works for the company called proponents of a TikTok ban driven “solely” by anti-Chinese racism last year in an online posting that he deleted after National Review asked him about it.
Pappas’s tweet signals a new strategy from the company’s C-suite, more fully embracing rhetoric to cast its opponents as xenophobic as the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. and Congress prepare to potentially move against TikTok’s ownership by its Chinese Communist Party–linked parent company, ByteDance.
During today’s four-hour hearing, virtually none of the committee’s 52 members expressed support of TikTok’s proposal to work with the U.S. government to set up a secure data center walling off most data from China-based employees, a plan dubbed Project Texas. Instead, lawmakers ripped into Chew, a former CFO of ByteDance, over the app’s data-privacy foibles and connections to China.
“You’ve been one of the few people to unite this committee,” said Representative Tony Cardenas, a California Democrat, just before comparing Chew to Fred Astaire, “a good dancer,” because Chew is a “good dancer with words,” and saying, “A lot of your answers are a bit nebulous, not yes or no.”
Chew repeatedly dodged questions about a number of issues, including whether the CCP can force TikTok to promote its propaganda during a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and whether he acknowledges that the Chinese government is persecuting its Uyghur population.
After the hearing, TikTok’s public-relations team also lectured Congress on how the company believes the lawmakers should have behaved.
“Our CEO, @ShouChew, came prepared to answer questions from Congress, but unfortunately, the day was dominated by political grandstanding that failed to acknowledge real solutions already underway through Project Texas or address industry-wide issues of youth safety,” a tweet from the company’s official PR account stated.
Part of TikTok’s new strategy is to move away from attempting to persuade lawmakers of the merits of the plan and instead to mobilize its base of Gen Z voters to inflict political pain on U.S. officials who speak out about the national-security implications of the app.
TikTok paid for several of the top influencers on its app to lobby lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week. Representative Jamal Bowman teamed up with the tech company to host a press conference showcasing the influencers. Earlier this week, Bowman called the push to regulate TikTok as “racist toward China.”