\n<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s hearing on child safety<\/a> was \u2014 mostly \u2014 an unusually focused affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee called up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for four hours on the potential dangers their services posed for children. Many of the lawmakers emphasized emotional impact, playing to an audience filled with families who\u2019d had kids targeted by predators or otherwise harmed online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But midway through the hearing, it was dragged off course by a predictable tangent: the fact that TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. And a meeting ostensibly about keeping kids safe dipped into a now-familiar attempt<\/a> to make TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew answer questions utterly unrelated to the rest of the day.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Although attempts to ban TikTok last year mostly fizzled, there are real concerns about its data storage policies and Chinese government influence over its moderation. Some lawmakers touched on them, asking Chew to offer an update on Project Texas<\/a>, its data security initiative. (TikTok is still working on it.) But the questions also strayed into attempts to simply highlight TikTok\u2019s un-American origins, culminating in Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) pressing Chew aggressively and repetitively on his citizenship \u2014 which, it\u2019s widely known, is Singaporean.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou often say that you live in Singapore,\u201d Cotton said before demanding to know where Chew\u2019s passport was from (Singapore, obviously) and whether he\u2019d applied for citizenship in China or the US (no, said Chew). \u201cHave you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?\u201d he then asked abruptly, as if hoping to catch Chew by surprise. Chew\u2019s response wasn\u2019t shocked so much as fed up. \u201cSenator! I\u2019m Singaporean!\u201d he reiterated. \u201cNo.\u201d (Singapore is not part of China.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Drew Harwell described Cotton\u2019s line of questioning<\/a> as \u201cMcCarthy-esque.\u201d Chew\u2019s relationship to China was already discussed exhaustively when he appeared before Congress<\/a> last year, and Cotton didn\u2019t make clear what it had to do with child safety here. It\u2019s not even necessary to make the case that China might have undue influence over TikTok. Apple, for instance, has weathered years of critiques about its relationship<\/a> to the Chinese government; no reasonable person has ever suggested this hinges on Tim Cook being a secret communist. Instead, it\u2019s a line of questioning that seems simply designed to play on Chew\u2019s foreignness \u2014 even when it\u2019s got nothing to do with the topic at hand.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n