One thing was evident after TikTok CEO Shou Chew spoke before a House committee for more than five hours on Thursday: American legislators continue to believe that TikTok poses a serious threat to national security.
During the session, which was Chew’s first appearance before Congress, a lawmaker aggressively demanded that TikTok be outlawed. Deep suspicion was shown by a number of politicians towards TikTok’s attempts to protect US user data and allay worries about its ties to China. Nothing Chew said seemed to change the situation.
The arguments made both inside and outside the hearing room demonstrated the strong, bipartisan support for banning the app in the US. During the hearing, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared his support for legislation that would effectively outlaw TikTok; Secretary of State Antony Blinken declared that TikTok should be “ended one way or another”; and the Treasury Department issued a statement pledging to “safeguard national security” without specifically mentioning TikTok.
Governments around the world have banned TikTok from being used on official equipment due to concerns about its ties to China, and this has contributed to the deteriorating US-China relationship. The Biden administration had previously threatened to impose a nationwide ban on TikTok unless its Chinese owners sold their shares, but the comments made across the federal government on Thursday reveal that such a move is still very much a possibility.
However, evidence regarding whether TikTok poses a threat to national security is still lacking more than two years after the Trump administration first issued a similar warning to the app. Security experts claim that despite being serious, the government’s worries currently only seem to reflect the possibility of TikTok being used for gathering foreign intelligence, not that it already has. Public proof that the Chinese government has really spied on people using TikTok is still lacking.
China is not where TikTok is active. But, because the Chinese government has considerable sway over the companies that fall under its purview, the idea holds that ByteDance, and therefore indirectly TikTok, could be pressured to assist with a wide range of security measures, possibly even the handover of TikTok data.
