Lawmakers leading a House panel on China are telling TikTok to stop its campaign to have users lobby Congress against measures meant to rid the app of its influence from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In a letter to the Chinese-owned video-sharing platform, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), and the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), said TikTok has been “spreading false claims in its campaign to manipulate and mobilize American citizens on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party” as it faces congressional scrutiny.
The letter included a screenshot showing TikTok rallying its U.S. users ahead of the bill’s congressional vote to “speak up now—before your government strips 170 million Americans of their Constitutional right to free expression.”
The TikTok pop-up screen, with white text against a black background and a red button reading “call now,” also claims that the proposed U.S. measure is equivalent to a total ban that will “damage millions of businesses, destroy the livelihoods of countless creators across the country, and deny artists an audience.”
The two lawmakers, noting that TikTok had solicited location information in the campaign, branded the act as a “new low.”
“These messages are deceptive,” the lawmakers told TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew. Rather than an outright ban, they said, the bill “gives TikTok six months to eliminate foreign adversary control” to stay in the United States.
“All TikTok would have to do is separate from CCP-controlled ByteDance,” they said. But if TikTok decided not to do so and got removed from U.S. app stores, the letter stated, “TikTok would have no one but itself to blame—it would be choosing this path by opting for CCP control rather than Americans’ privacy and national security.”
Top U.S. national security officials have sounded an alarm about the national security risks posed by the app.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, in a January hearing before the House China committee, said he had “significant security concerns” about TikTok over the vast amount of U.S. user data in its hands.
“It’s a combination of the ability that the Chinese government would have, if they choose to exercise it, to control the collection of the data to control the recommendation algorithm, and if they wanted to, to be able to control and compromise devices,” he said. And on top of that, he said, is the ability to collect U.S. user data and “feed that into their AI engine.”
“It just magnifies the problem,” he said.
When asked whether he supports a TikTok ban, he answered, “As long as the Chinese government has the ability to control all these aspects of the business—I don’t see how you get your way clear to mitigating those concerns.”
Lawmakers in the March 11 letter said TikTok’s “desperate actions” are “consistent with the pattern of the CCP exerting malign influence over the application.”
“Using your platform to deceive the American people about bipartisan U.S. legislation underscores the clear necessity of the bill currently under consideration. Next week, TikTok could be spreading false information about a war. This fall, it could be about our elections,” they wrote.
Attention on TikTok has grown on the Senate side as well.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, highlighted concerns about the TikTok algorithm in the annual Worldwide Threats Assessment hearing on March 11.
“The reason why TikTok is so successful, the reason why it’s so attractive, is because it knows you better than you know yourself, and the more you use it, the more it learns,” he said. “The problem is not TikTok or the videos. The problem is the algorithm that powers it is controlled by a company in China that must do whatever the Chinese Communist Party tells them to do.”
TikTok didn’t respond by press time to The Epoch Times’ request for comment.
