The House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) sent a letter on May 10 to the CEO of the social media video platform TikTok, in which the committee stated concerns about how the CCP can use the platform to spy on Americans and censor and block free expression, and which also requested information and answers.
TikTok, owned by the Chinese company, ByteDance, has 1.8 billion monthly users and is a particular favorite among young people.
“Just last week, TikTok suspended a TikTok account from the Acton Institute, which was sharing clips from a documentary about Hong Kong newspaper owner Jimmy Lai, who was imprisoned for his support for Hong Kong’s democracy movement,” wrote the chairman of the committee, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), and 12 other members in the letter they sent to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew.
The letter continued, “Recent reporting also revealed that TikTok was tracking individuals who interacted with gay content, and a third report published internal documents showing how TikTok’s parent company ByteDance tracks and censors ’sensitive words’—in practice, topics disfavored by the Chinese Communist Party.”
Later in the letter, the committee said that TikTok has suppressed information that the CCP disfavors and seeks to shield from public scrutiny, including the CCP’s “genocide of Uyghur Muslims, the status of Tibet, and the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.”
TikTok responded to a request for comment from The Epoch Times, saying that it confirmed it had received the letter from the committee.
Those who worry about how the CCP may use TikTok for practices that can hurt the United States and exploit American vulnerabilities point to the Chinese National Intelligence Law, which includes the directive, “any organization or citizen shall support, assist and cooperate with the state intelligence work in accordance with the law.”
The Center for International Security (CIS), a leading nonprofit community of IT and security professionals that promotes and offers free practices to protect IT systems and information and intelligence, has published and spoken out on the security and privacy threat of TikTok—a threat enabled by the quantity and type of data it collects on users.
“For context, tech firm Cambridge Analytica used psychometric data leading up to the U.S. 2016 presidential election to enhance targeted manipulation as part of efforts to ‘nudge’ the opinions of a large userbase and influence their votes, noted Intelligencer.” The Intelligencer is the news and news analysis site of New York Magazine.
Response to CCP’s Growing Threat
Following the new Republican-led House being seated in January, and with the CCP representing a growing threat to U.S. national security and financial interests, GOP members of the lower chamber of Congress stewarded a rare bipartisan effort to create the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, known by its short form—Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.The vote on the resolution establishing the committee passed 365–65, with 146 Democrats joining Republicans and all 65 “no” votes coming from Democrats, who said they opposed forming the committee because they felt it would become too partisan.
