TikTok chief to meet US lawmakers over data privacy, censorship issues

This article is co-written by Tracy Qu.

Huawei Technologies, the Chinese telecoms giant banned and blacklisted by the US, has found a strange bedfellow in its quest to quell US fears over national security amid an escalating tech war between the world’s two largest economies: a short-video app for teenagers.

Photo credit: Alexey Malkin / 123RF

While Huawei has launched legal challenges to Washington’s actions, the head of short-video platform TikTok, Alex Zhu, is trying a different approach – a goodwill tour to Capitol Hill where he will sit down with American lawmakers to try and assuage their concerns over censorship and user privacy.

The meetings, scheduled for this week, come as the video app’s Beijing-based owner Bytedance is under increasing scrutiny to address censorship and data privacy fears as the app accumulates users at a faster rate than Facebook or Instagram, according to industry estimates.

Among the senators, Republican Marsha Blackburn is among the first to confirm a meeting with Zhu, following her open letter to the TikTok chief last month where she expressed concerns over how the app could help the Chinese government “gain unfettered and unsupervised access” to American children’s lives.

“Because TikTok is owned by Bytedance, the app is subject to foreign laws that allow China’s government to seize its information and technology,” she said in the letter, adding that more information is required to ensure the protection of children’s privacy.

TikTok did not immediately respond to inquiries sent via email about Zhu’s US trip.

Senator Blackburn did not immediately respond to an inquiry sent via her website.

Tech giants in the US have faced headwinds over the past year amid rising concerns over their monopoly positions and unchecked collection of user data. Google is facing an antitrust probe by 50 attorneys general in the US, while Facebook is under the regulatory spotlight after massive data breaches over the past two years.

The US is TikTok’s third-largest market after India and China, accounting for about 123.8 million downloads or 8.2% of the total, according to Sensor Tower. The Chinese-owned company says its user data is stored in Virginia, with a backup server in Singapore, and that it would never share user data with the Chinese government or even with its parent company.

Still, the US army banned soldiers from using TikTok due to potential national security risks, according to Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, speaking to CNBC last week. The move came after the top Democrat in the US Senate, Chuck Schumer, expressed concern about the US military’s use of TikTok for recruiting American teenagers.

In an interview with The New York Times last month, Zhu said the app would never censor videos that displeased the ruling Communist Party. When asked what he would do if Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally asked the company to take down a video or hand over user data, Zhu replied: “I would turn him down.”

However, doubts resurfaced less than two weeks later after a US teenager complained about losing access to her account after posting a video critical of the Chinese government’s treatment of Uygur Muslims in Xinjiang. The company first attributed the penalty to a previous video she had posted, but later acknowledged it was due to a “human moderation error.”