The House Energy and Commerce Committee’s much-hyped hearing on TikTok, featuring CEO Shou Chew, took place Thursday without many fireworks. But over the course of five hours, lawmakers grilled Chew not only about TikTok’s or his own links to China, but also issues that are common across all social media platforms, like the promotion of harmful content and the immense amount of data they collect about their users.
Members of the committee were almost uniformly critical of TikTok, but many — though not all — eschewed the grandstanding that has become more common at high-profile hearings like this. Instead, they asked Chew things that they actually seemed to want answers to.
This was Chew’s first appearance before Congress, and he’s generally kept a low profile in the United States until fairly recently. So aside from the polished and infrequent videos Chew has posted on TikTok itself, the hearing was the first time many Americans got to see the company’s public face. While the hearing was never going to make or break TikTok, if Chew really blew it, his app’s future in the US could be that much cloudier. And while he was at times evasive and seemed unprepared for some questions that he must have known would be asked, Chew’s big day on Capitol Hill wasn’t a total disaster. His performance probably won’t change anyone’s mind, either.
Thursday’s hearing was also Congress’s chance to make the case to the American people that the app is a national security threat that can only be addressed by a ban. That allegation comes from the potential for the Chinese government to obtain the data of TikTok’s 150 million US users or influence its recommendation algorithms to push propaganda or disinformation on them. Yet that allegation has been backed up by very little public evidence that such things are happening, and so the unprecedented move of banning an app based on that allegation has seemed extreme and possibly unnecessary.
But again, many…
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