TikTok on Capitol Hill

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Up next, taking down TikTok in the US.

Last week, TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew testified before a Congressional committee with Republicans and Democrats united in their concern over TikTok’s future in the United States.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: WORLD’s Washington Bureau reporter Leo Briceno explains what’s at stake.

LEO BRICENO, REPORTER: The video sharing app TikTok is everywhere—it’s at the top of Apple’s app store, in the hands of about 150 million American users, and now it’s at the center of some of the most critical considerations in Congress. The Senate recently introduced a bill to ban the app or force its sale.

The proposed legislation, known as the RESTRICT act, would give the president the power to ban Information and Communication technologies or force their sale if they’re owned by a foreign adversary or pose a risk to the country. Here’s the bill’s sponsor, Democrat Senator Mark Warner

MARK WARNER: So instead of playing whack-a-mole on Huawei one day, CTE the next, Kaspersky, TikTok, we need a more comprehensive approach to evaluating and mitigating these threats posed by these foreign technologies from these adversarial nations.

Critics of the proposed law say that’s a violation of the First Amendment. Depending on whether the ban focuses on national security or not, those critics might be right.

But why does Congress feel that a ban is necessary in the first place?

Just five years ago TikTok went from being an app that no one knew about to a platform outperforming the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. The fact that so many Americans are using it—especially underage users—makes policymakers uneasy about what kinds of data collection practices are going on behind the scenes.

What sets TikTok apart from other social platforms with powerful algorithms is its ownership. Because ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, is based in China, lawmakers are concerned that the Chinese Communist Party may be looking over the app’s shoulder at the troves of American data the app could have access to. What is the relationship between the CCP and Byte dance? Would ByteDance have to surrender data to the Chinese government if asked to do so? And what kind of privacy measures does the app have in place to protect Americans?

TikTok CEO Shou Chew faced these—and hundreds of other questions earlier this month at a congressional hearing. Both Democrats and Republicans in the Energy and Commerce Committee made their feelings very clear. Here is representative Bill Bilirakis, followed by Shou Chew.

BILIRAKIS: Do you have full responsibility over the algorithms used by tiktok to prioritize content to its users? Yes or no, please.

CHEW: Congressman, we, we do take these issues very seriously.

BILIRAKIS: Yes or no.

CHEW: And we do provide resources for anyone who types in anything that—

BILIRAKIS: Sir, yes or no.

Even with a rare bipartisan alliance in Congress against the app, a ban of TikTok still has to respect the free speech rights of the many Americans who use the app to express themselves. It also has to overcome the Berman Amendments—a Cold-War-era policy that prevents the ban of books, information, and the like from a foreign rival. If the ban has any hope of clearing that hurdle, it has to focus on the national security questions posed by TikTok. Concerns about content that may be harming children are nonetheless concerns about speech. And in America, that’s constitutionally protected.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Leo Briceno

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