On Thursday morning, the chief executive of what is perhaps the world\u2019s most popular social app went before Congress. Like so many social media CEOs before him, Shou Zi Chew\u2019s mission was to persuade skeptical lawmakers that his company, TikTok, operates responsibly and within the bounds of the law. In the face of doubts and outright hostility, Chew would have to remain calm and genial, attempting to make his case while in the straitjacket of Congress\u2019 hearing format: an hours-long series of mostly yes-or-no questions, his answers preempted by most lawmakers before he could begin a second sentence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
It is a ritual previously endured by Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Sundar Pichai, and Jack Dorsey, among others. And while each of them faced withering questions, in the end withering questions is all that Congress really gave them. Hearings like these are often framed as a precursor to stringent regulation, but in the United States they are a substitute for them. Congress yells at social media companies \u2014 posting clips of their sickest burns on the very companies they criticize \u2014 and then fails to pass a single piece of legislation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
TikTok\u2019s hearing might have gone this way, too, were it not for one overarching, bipartisan concern: that the company\u2019s owner, ByteDance, might be forced by the Chinese government to surveil Americans or seek to influence them by promoting pro-China or anti-US content.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
National privacy legislation would do more to protect against the misuse of Americans\u2019 data<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
It\u2019s for that reason that the Biden administration, like the Trump administration before it, now seeks to force ByteDance to divest the app<\/a>. That\u2019s an outcome that Chew is determined to avoid, he told lawmakers Thursday.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cDivestment doesn\u2019t address the fundamental concerns that I have heard, as a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access,\u201d Chew said in his prepared testimony<\/a> before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. \u201cThis is not an issue of nationality. All global companies face common challenges that need to be addressed through safeguards and transparency.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Chew is right that national privacy legislation would do more to protect against the misuse of Americans\u2019 data than divestment or a ban. But there is a fundamental concern that either outcome would<\/em> address: its Chinese ownership.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And while they are far apart on most issues, most Democrats and Republicans at today\u2019s marathon hearing agreed: Chinese ownership of TikTok is untenable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI still believe that the Beijing, Communist government will still control and influence what you do,\u201d said Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-NJ). The company\u2019s proposed solution, the data-silo initiative it calls Project Texas<\/a>, \u201cis simply not acceptable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Chew was pummeled by lawmakers of both parties for problems both real and fictional<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n What happens next is anyone\u2019s guess. The Biden administration seems likely to attempt to force divestiture<\/a>. China said Thursday that it will strongly oppose such a move<\/a> and would prevent ByteDance from spinning out TikTok.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That leaves the prospect of a ban, which is in uncertain territory legally. When the Trump administration tried to force a sale, it was blocked by the courts \u2014 and experts say the Biden administration is likely to run into the same issues. The Washington Post<\/em> reported today that the administration believes that Congress would need to pass a law to make an actual ban possible<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It would be remarkable if the first meaningful piece of federal tech regulation passed in years was a bill that eliminated TikTok outright. And yet observers of today\u2019s hearing tended to agree that it seems likelier than it did before Chew\u2019s five hours on the stand, during which he was pummeled by lawmakers of both parties for problems both real and fictional.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cShou came prepared to answer questions from Congress, but, unfortunately, the day was dominated by political grandstanding that failed to acknowledge the real solutions already underway through Project Texas or productively address industry-wide issues of youth safety,\u201d TikTok told me in a statement afterward. \u201cAlso not mentioned today by members of the Committee: the livelihoods of the 5 million businesses on TikTok or the First Amendment implications of banning a platform loved by 150 million Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m sympathetic to those concerns, as I wrote here last week<\/a>. But it also seems to me that TikTok made several tactical errors alongside the original sin (in Congress\u2019 eyes) of being developed in China. And there may be lessons for the next generation of big consumer apps, who will begin with global ambitions but quickly find themselves faced with similar skepticism from lawmakers and regulators around the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what went wrong for ByteDance and TikTok?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Incidentally, I don\u2019t see this as merely a case of what China-based apps should learn about launching in the United States. The same underlying logic in this case could well lead to an American app being banned in India, for example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what went wrong for ByteDance and TikTok?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n First, it\u2019s important to say again that ByteDance really did have a bad hand to play here. Lawmakers have asked the company to prove a negative \u2014 that no one\u2019s data is being misused, and no one is being unduly influenced. Neither the company nor outside investigators have found much evidence of either (emphasis on much). But the looming specter that something can or will go wrong in the future has been extremely difficult for TikTok to overcome.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Second, it gave its worst critics powerful ammunition. Amid what once seemed like paranoid fears of surveillance, it surveilled American journalists<\/a>. Among similar concerns about how TikTok could be used to spread propaganda, ByteDance reportedly pushed pro-China messaging in a now-defunct US news app<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n ByteDance has said the former case was a case of overreach by its security team, and denied the latter. But in cases where the company truly needed a spotless record, Emily Baker-White\u2019s reporting suggested that there was something to be afraid of here after all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Three, when it came to China, TikTok always stayed in kayfabe<\/a>. Pardon my use of a term from pro wrestling here, but it\u2019s the only one that fits. In wrestling, kayfabe is the agreed-upon reality that enables spectators to suspend their disbelief while watching events with scripted outcomes. For TikTok, kayfabe was the system that forced executives to say with a straight face that they have meaningful independence from ByteDance and would never agree to share data with the Chinese state.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Here\u2019s what Chew told lawmakers on that subject today:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I understand that there are concerns stemming from the inaccurate belief that TikTok\u2019s corporate structure makes it beholden to the Chinese government or that it shares information about U.S. users with the Chinese government. This is emphatically untrue. TikTok is led by an executive team in the United States and Singapore and has global offices, including in Los Angeles, Silicon Valley, Nashville, New York, Washington, DC, Dublin, London, Paris, Berlin, Dubai, Singapore, Jakarta, Seoul, and Tokyo. Our headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore. TikTok is not available in mainland China.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n In kayfabe, then, TikTok is an independent app that is not \u201cbeholden to the Chinese government.\u201d And in reality, here\u2019s what a spokeswoman for China\u2019s Commerce Ministry said about the possibility of forced divestiture: \u201cIf the news is true, China will firmly oppose it<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n As this whole drama has unfolded, I have been waiting for the moment when someone at TikTok would level with us \u2014 would say yes, China does make various demands of our parent company, and decides our future, and this is awkward but we are doing our best to address it in these ways.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The fact that no one there ever said that gave the strong impression that they couldn\u2019t<\/em> say that \u2014 and in a low-trust environment, that sort of thing breeds suspicions that are difficult to overcome.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Of course, had Chew dared to acknowledged China\u2019s power, that also could have roiled US lawmakers. (To say nothing of the Chinese state, which all but chased ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming into hiding<\/a> in 2021 for reasons that were never fully explained.) But at the very least it would have allowed for a more honest discussion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Four, TikTok really reckoned with the fact that ranked feeds often make people feel uneasy, or even bad. In fairness, none of the social companies have figured out a solution to this problem. But I think it dampened support for TikTok broadly, and it\u2019s a reason we haven\u2019t seen users marching in the streets to oppose a ban. (At least not yet.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n TikTok does appear to be waking up to this problem<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Here\u2019s a statistic that helps capture that. In a recent Post<\/em> survey, 17 percent of daily TikTok users \u2014 nearly one in five \u2014 said they would support a ban<\/a>. For people who use the app at least monthly, support for a ban came in at 21 percent. How else to explain that, if not a deep concern that using the app so much is not good for us?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n TikTok does appear to be waking up to this problem \u2014 it added a dedicated feed of science and math videos<\/a>, just in time for Chew to promote it to lawmakers today. But that basic unease persists. And so users sit on their hands, even as the prospect of other apps being banned has triggered protests around the world. (Uber, another app that is at perpetual risk of being banned, does a better job getting drivers and riders to take to the streets<\/a>.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Finally, TikTok never really got older people to use it. In particular, it struggled to get members of Congress to use it. The Post<\/em> reported that just one member of today\u2019s committee \u2014\u00a0 Rep. Tony C\u00e1rdenas (D-CA) \u2014 has an active, verified TikTok account<\/a>. (Two others appear to have deleted theirs.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s easy to ban an app you never use, particularly when you can do it in the name of national security. I suspect that were Facebook or Twitter owned by a Chinese company, Congress would feel much more motivated to find a solution that let them continuing to use their accounts for promotion and fundraising.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We still don\u2019t know what TikTok\u2019s final disposition could be. It seems possible that it could outlast the Biden administration through the sheer force of inertia, just as it outlasted Trump. But if this indeed proves to be the moment Congress comes together to regulate a big tech platform, TikTok\u2019s days may be truly numbered. And while it may be the case that nothing could have saved a China-based app in a moment like this, it\u2019s also true that, in some important ways, TikTok brought all this on itself.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n