Yesterday continued Congress\u2019s recent history of calling tech executives into a hearing to berate them about their excessive collection of users\u2019 private data for financial means. But where Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai suffered through the hearings only to face little to no repercussions for their potentially egregious collection of data and anti-competitive practices, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was met with something far more defined<\/a> \u2014 and the users of his platform immediately picked up on it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYour platform should be banned,\u201d was one of the first things Chew heard when the hearing started. That was from Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) in her opening statement. Her mind seemed made up, as did many of the members of Congress on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and for the next few hours, Chew was berated by the committee members for everything from TikTok challenges to NyQuil chicken. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n The members seemed particularly interested in TikTok\u2019s relationship with China. And that makes sense. China is an authoritarian capitalist state where the government will happily exert influence to build profit but where it also has undue influence over the companies that base their operations there. Because TikTok\u2019s parent company, ByteDance, is based in China, there\u2019s potential for China to gain access to data managed by TikTok that it might not be able to for companies based in other countries, such as Meta and Google. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n China\u2019s reach in this regard is wide, and its ability to exert influence is powerful. When Canada arrested the CFO and daughter of Huawei\u2019s founder in 2018<\/a>, China retaliated by arresting two Canadians<\/a> and retrying and sentencing a third to death<\/a>. \u201cBecause of the nature of the political system in China, you are naturally associated with the government, and the government could put a lot of pressure on any firm in China to turn in data and to spy on other countries,\u201d Lynette Ong, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto, told me at the time<\/a>. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n China\u2019s also retaliated against its own citizens. When Alibaba\u2019s founder, Jack Ma, spoke out against planned tech regulation, he seemed to disappear<\/a> in a similar fashion to the famous actress Fan Bingbing<\/a> (her crime was failing to pay enough taxes).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And users on TikTok took notice<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n But China\u2019s ability to exert terrible influence on its companies and citizens and how that can make TikTok susceptible to undue influence wasn\u2019t the line of questioning Congress seemed interested in pursuing. The few times it did come up, the questioning Congress member would often continue their rant, never giving Chew time to answer. Congress spent a lot of time asking him about affiliations with the Chinese Communist Party \u2014 China\u2019s sole ruling political party. Frequently, they would refer to the party, generally called the CCP, as \u201ccommunists,\u201d calling back to the days of McCarthyism. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Between their obsession with communism, their often obnoxious and condescending tone<\/a>, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese, despite his repeated reminders that he is Singaporean, the hearing was a weird, brutal, xenophobic mess. And users<\/a> on<\/a> TikTok<\/a> took<\/a> notice<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n They were not fans. The app has been flooded with videos (which TikTok itself could very well be boosting) of users mocking Congress<\/a>, supporting Chew and TikTok<\/a>, and pointing out the flagrant hypocrisy<\/a> of Congress\u2019s decision to target TikTok while ignoring the equally egregious abuse of data and algorithms by its American competitors. TikTok might drive dangerous challenges embraced by teens, but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s incited a genocide as Meta has<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is kind of the problem with engaging in a xenophobic and deeply hypocritical campaign against a single, wildly popular app. Its very engaged users will notice you\u2019re being an asshole! And while Chew certainly didn\u2019t do himself or TikTok a lot of favors yesterday<\/a> or in the years since Trump first called for a ban<\/a>, Congress was in rare form.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The idea of a Congressional hearing is you get people mad and on your side so you have the political capital to push through whatever bills you\u2019ve written on the matter. But sometimes you just look like a dumbass, and Congress looked thunderingly out of touch yesterday<\/a>. Whatever political capital they\u2019d hoped to gain was lost on the users of TikTok. Representatives lectured Chew and TikTok users over the danger of the app, but wrapping it up in weird xenophobic rhetoric and tech illiteracy just made them look pathetic to the audience they were trying to reach.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n