For years, TikTok has been the subject of intense debate over national security concerns, but it wasn’t until last week when it truly reached the center of the cultural zeitgeist.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced a rare bipartisan grilling on Capitol Hill. While many questions Chew faced were about the harm TikTok has exposed to children, the most intense inquiries were about whether China has influence over the app’s content and data through ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the popular social media platform.
Chew repeatedly attempted to distance TikTok from the Chinese Communist Party, assuring Congress that China isn’t calling the shots as its critics say. But his comments left both Republicans and Democrats skeptical.
The unique opposition to TikTok from both sides of the aisle has fueled the movement to ban the app not just on government devices but in the U.S. entirely, which would be unprecedented.
But while TikTok faces animosity in D.C., it has found staunch defenders among the legacy media.
Members of the media are circling the wagons to defend TikTok as a bipartisan effort to ban the Chinese app continues. (Photographer: Gabby Jones/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The editorial board of The Los Angeles Times accused Congress of “scapegoating” TikTok, telling readers it’s “no worse than other social media platforms.”
“While TikTok is currently the target of federal inquiry, primarily because of growing anxiety with China’s power and influence, the concerns over user privacy, misinformation and impacts to children are not unique to TikTok,” the Times wrote. “Simply banning TikTok doesn’t address the larger problem. Regulations and policies that protect Americans’ online privacy and limit the potential for harm to users, young and old, are long overdue.”
CNN attempted to tie the uproar over TikTok to the rise in hate crimes towards Asian Americans, saying the targeting of the Chinese app “isn’t helping.”
“There are good reasons to be mistrustful of ByteDance given that it is subject to China’s extremely broad surveillance laws… And the Chinese government’s authoritarian approach to numerous other issues clashes with important American values, said many Asian Americans interviewed for this article. But they also warned that policymakers’ choice to use inflammatory speech — in some cases, language tinged with 1950s-era, Red Scare-style McCarthyism — endangers countless innocent Americans by association,” CNN’s Brian Fung wrote Monday.
Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz ran cover for TikTok on Tuesday, knocking lawmakers for suggesting that the cited viral challenges that have harmed children originated from the platform but in reality originated elsewhere. Her article’s headline declared, “Congress had a lot to say about TikTok. Much of it was wrong.”
Washington Post tech columnist Taylor Lorenz has long given glowing coverage to TikTok and its biggest influencers. (MSNBC)
Lorenz, for example, boasted that TikTok search results show content about Uyghur genocide and the Tiananmen Square massacre after House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers R-Wa., warned Chew “making false or misleading statements to Congress is a federal crime” when he denied any censorship of such content took place, though the Post itself previously reported that TikTok did censor the 2019 Hong Kong protests.
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Her colleague, Washington Post tech reporter Drew Harwell, derided lawmakers by tweeting, “Today, members of Congress who have never used TikTok will be calling for the ban of a free-expression platform used by 150 million across the U.S.”
Harwell was one of the reporters who broke the news about the Hong Kong censorship.
The New York Times ran a piece headlined “TikTok Stars Go On a D.C. Field Trip” about how TikTok paid the platform’s biggest influencers to become “temporary lobbyists” in an effort to sway lawmakers away from supporting a ban.
“TikTok flew the creators (and their plus-ones) first class to Washington and put them up in a high-end hotel for the week. On Tuesday, the group had dinner with Mr. Chew, who appeared in a number of videos posted that night,” the Times reported.
One of the TikTok influencers shrugged off security concerns, telling the Times “Security and privacy is a No. 1 priority for the app,” though the Times acknowledged that the influencers “would echo TikTok talking points on what it says it is doing to safeguard personal data.”
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew repeatedly denied assertions that the Chinese government has ulimate authority over the popular social media platform. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
The biggest takeaway from last week’s congressional hearing, according to the left-wing site Salon, was the “bizarre GOP racism.”
“When leading Republicans on the committee veered the discussion away from U.S. data privacy policies into unfounded accusations against Chew based on his Chinese heritage and incoherent fears about Chinese surveillance, the mockery from online denizens was swift and severe,” Salon wrote Sunday before quoting Republican-bashing critics.
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ABC News tried having it both ways on Tuesday with the headline “No evidence of TikTok national security threat but reason for concern, experts say.”
“A key fear among lawmakers and other government officials is that TikTok could share sweeping data on U.S. users with the Chinese government or the Chinese government could force the platform to manipulate the content displayed to U.S.-based users. But there is no evidence available that suggests TikTok has shared U.S. user data or altered content for U.S. users at the behest of the Chinese government, cybersecurity experts said,” the Disney-owned network wrote. “Despite a lack of evidence for the national security threat posed by TikTok, it remains a legitimate theoretical concern, since China has shown a previous willingness to exploit user data and wields extensive authority over domestic companies, cybersecurity experts said.”