Yesterday continued the recent history of Congress of subpoenaing CTOs for a hearing to berate them for over-harvesting users’ private data for financial means. But while Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai suffered under interrogation only to suffer little to no repercussions for potentially egregious data collection and anti-competitive practices, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced something rather more defined — and users of his platform he took care of it straight away.
“Your platform ought to be banned” was one among the primary things Chew heard when the audition began. This was from Chairwoman Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) in her opening statement. She appeared to have made up her mind, as did many members of Congress on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and for the following few hours, Chew was criticized by committee members for every part from TikTok challenges to NyQuil chicken.
Members seemed particularly thinking about TikTok’s relationship with China. And that is smart. China is an authoritarian capitalist state where the federal government will happily exert influence to generate profits, but it surely also has undue influence over the businesses that do business there. Since TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, relies in China, China can access data managed by TikTok that corporations from other countries, corresponding to Meta and Google, may not.
China’s reach on this regard is wide and its power of influence powerful. When Canada arrested Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter in 2018, China retaliated arresting two Canadians AND retrial and sentencing the third to death. “Due to the character of the political system in China, you’re naturally tied to the federal government, and the federal government can put lots of pressure on any company in China to share data and spy on other countries,” Lynette Ong, associate professor of political science on the University of Toronto, he told me then.
China also took revenge by itself residents. When Alibaba founder Jack Ma spoke out against the planned tech regulations, appeared to disappear in a way just like famous actress Fan Bingbing (her crime was not paying enough taxes).
And TikTok users took notice
But China’s ability to exert a terrible influence on its businesses and residents, and the way that might leave TikTok vulnerable to undue influence, has not been the road of questioning Congress. The few times this got here up, the questioning member of Congress would often go on together with his tirade, giving Chew no time to reply. Congress spent an extended time questioning him about his ties to the Chinese Communist Party, the one ruling political party in China. They often referred to the party, generally known as the CCP, as “Communists”, alluding to the McCarthy era.
Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending toneand the occasional assumption that Chew is Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he’s Singaporean, the audition was an odd, violent, xenophobic mess. AND users ON ICT took announcement.
They weren’t fans. The app was flooded with videos (which TikTok itself could thoroughly enhance) of users mocking Congress, supporting Chew and TikTokAND showing obvious hypocrisy Congress’ decision to attack TikTok, ignoring equally blatant data and algorithm abuses by US competitors. TikTok may face dangerous challenges undertaken by teenagers, but I do not think it’s incitement to genocide like Meta did.
This is form of the issue with engaging in a xenophobic and deeply hypocritical campaign against one wildly popular app. Its highly engaged users will notice that you simply are an asshole! And while Chew actually didn’t do himself or TikTok much favors yesterday or within the years since Trump first called for a ban, Congress has been in rare form.
The idea of a congressional hearing is that you simply drive people crazy and take your side, so you’ve the political capital to push whatever bills you write about it. But sometimes you only seem like a idiot and Congress seemed horribly out of touch yesterday. Whatever political capital they hoped to realize was lost by TikTok users. Representatives lectured Chew and TikTok users concerning the dangers of the app, but wrapping them in strange xenophobic rhetoric and technical illiteracy made them seem pathetic to the audience they were trying to succeed in.
If the plan was to get people to reconsider using TikTok as US jockeys for global leadership with China, I do not think it would succeed. Not if all of our FYP channels are something price noting.
