The Delay in the ByteDance Investigation of the Social Media Sensitive TikTok Exposure: Congressional Republicans and the Biden Administration

And even though there is no evidence that the Chinese government has attempted to gain access to TikTok data, rhetoric from lawmakers about the social media sensations has been grandiose in recent months.

The article, posted earlier on Thursday, said that ByteDance’s Internal Audit team — usually tasked with keeping an eye on those who currently work for the company or who have worked for the company in the past — planned on surveilling at least two Americans who “had never had an employment relationship with the company.” Forbes says its report was based on materials it reviewed but did not include details about who was potentially going to be tracked or why ByteDance was planning on tracking them, claiming that doing so may put its sources at risk.

“The delay is raising political risks for TikTok and its owner, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., as both Biden administration officials and newly-empowered congressional Republicans amp up their rhetoric on the company,” The WSJ’s John McKinnon, Aruna Viswanatha, and Stu Woo wrote in their report. “ByteDance has spent around $9 million lobbying in Washington over the past two years, according to disclosure reports.”

The proposed legislation would “block and prohibit all transactions” in the United States by social media companies with at least one million monthly users that are based in, or under the “substantial influence” of, countries that are considered foreign adversaries, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

Having TikTok on a device issued by the federal government is about to become illegal under a sprawling spending bill for the upcoming fiscal year released by lawmakers in Washington on Tuesday. It is expected to become law in the coming days to avert a partial government shutdown.

The sale of TikTok to Oracle and Walmart was put off after Beijing added some of their own programs for export control. The Biden administration replaced an executive order targeting TikTok with a directive focused on investigating technology linked to foreign adversaries, including China.

The Social Media Landscape: The Threat of a Social Media Ban on TikTok: State and Local Law Enforcement in the U.S.

“The agreement under review by CFIUS will meaningfully address any security concerns that have been raised at both the federal and state level,” Oberwetter said. “These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies—plans that we are well underway in implementing—to further secure our platform in the United States, and we will continue to brief lawmakers on them.”

A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter. Sign up for the daily digest chronicling the evolving media landscape here.

Many of the lawmakers’ concerns have to do with location tracking services within the app, which they fear could be used for espionage. It’s a standard feature for social media apps to have location tracking.

The bill would give exceptions for law enforcement activities, national security interests and activities, and security researchers.

“TikTok is loved by millions of Americans who use the platform to learn, grow their businesses, and connect with creative content that brings them joy,” a TikTok spokesperson told CNN last month.

Trudeau said in an exclusive interview that the Chinese government uses whatever tools are available to it to get information. “And we’ve also seen that Chinese owned or Chinese directed companies are very much answerable to the Communist Party of China.”

The ban on federal government devices is anIncremental restriction since most drastic measures have not advanced, because of the lack of political will.

Yet the panic about TikTok is overblown. While some data concerns exist—though none more extreme than those over any US-based social media platforms—policies and discourse around TikTok in politics amount to a modern-day Red Scare. American politicians are happy to point fingers at China for lacking security for their data, as they allow Big tech lobbyists to kill any meaningful attempts at federal social media regulation. It is impossible to put the app back in the box without a federal ban on TikTok throughout the United States. And when it comes to educating good media citizens in college classrooms, these TikTok bans will do more harm than good.

The Case for a Complete U.S. Senate Ban on ByteDance from the House Committee on Investment, Trade, and Security

According to testimony released by the House committee on Tuesday, ByteDance is not an agent of any country.

“Social media companies harvest all kinds of data about users, but they also know a lot about them on an individual level,” he said.

The national security review was lead by the Commerce Department, and Gina Raimondo thought the Biden administration was trying to get Tik Tok out of business in America.

A resolution could be made that the committee is satisfied with the steps that TikTok has taken to protect user data.

The deliberations of the Committee on Investment in the United States are secret and happen behind closed doors. It is not clear when the committee might finish its investigation, nor is it known which way it is leaning.

Canada announced it would also be banning the app on government devices beginning as soon as Tuesday, and the European Commission last week issued its own prohibition on the app on official devices, citing cybersecurity concerns.

ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country. However… you don’t simply have to take my word on that. Rather, our approach has been to work transparently and cooperatively with the U.S. government and Oracle to design robust solutions to address concerns about TikTok’s heritage.

For others, it will not move the needle. “Some lawmakers, frankly, do not care what ads TikTok is taking out, what pledges it’s making on its blog about independence, data privacy … They see an unmitigable risk of Chinese government access to data and/or influence over content, and so are going to push for a complete ban.”

“It certainly makes sense, then, for U.S. soldiers to be told, ‘Hey, don’t use the app because it might share your location information with other entities,” said Chander. “But that’s also true of the weather app and then lots of other apps that are existing in your phone, whether they’re owned by China or not.”

Ryan Calo is an information science professor at the University of Washington. There needs to be more improvements to data privacy in the United States, but the legislation proposed is more of a concern for geopolitics and not TikTok.

“The truth of the matter is, if the sophisticated Chinese intelligence sector wanted to gather information on particular state employees in the United States, it wouldn’t probably have to go through TikTok.”

“It’s always easy – and this happens across the world – to say that a foreign government is a threat, and ‘I’m protecting you from that foreign government,’ he says. “And I think we should be a little cautious about how that can be politicized in a way that far exceeds the actual threat in order to achieve political ends.”

First Amendment Concerns about the TikTok Communications Act and the American Digital Civil Libertarians’ Confrontation with China’s Privacy Laws

Both Chander and Calo are skeptical that an outright TikTok ban would gain much political momentum, and both argue that even if it were to move forward, banning a communication platform would raise First Amendment concerns. Calo believes that the discussion could push the policy in a positive direction.

The consequences of having so much commercial surveillance taking place of U.S. citizens and residents are right in the United States, he said. “And we should do something to address it, but not in this ad hoc posturing way, but by passing comprehensive privacy rules or laws, which is something that, for example, the Federal Trade Commission seems very interested in doing.”

But it isn’t just lobbying that has made some of these bills difficult to pass. It’s much more challenging to impose sweeping regulations on an entire industry than it is to pass a bill governing how the US government handles its own technology.

The tech industry’s largest players have faced a kitchen sink of allegations in recent years. Big Tech has been made out as one of Washington’s largest villains, from knee-capping budding rivals, to damaging children and mental health, to endangering democracy, to spreading Hate speech and harassment, to censoring conservative viewpoints.

Concerns have been raised by the US about China’s laws being used to get user data from TikTok or ByteDance.

Beckerman told Jake Tapper on CNN on Tuesday that he thinks a lot of the concerns are overblown and can be fixed through the government negotiations.

Lobbying to Shut Down the Biggest Tech Companies: The Censorship of the Tech Industry: The ByteDance Case

In 2019, ByteDance had 17 lobbyists and spent $270,000 on lobbying, according to public records gathered by the transparency group OpenSecrets. The company spent more than $5 million on lobbying by the end of last year.

Meta was the biggest internet industry lobbying giant last year, spending upward of $20 million. Amazon was the first to break the $1 million barrier, followed by Google at almost $10 million. Combined, that’s roughly $49 million in lobbying — almost 10 times what was spent by TikTok’s parent, which nevertheless clocked in at number four on the list.

One of those bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), would erect new barriers between tech platforms’ various lines of business, preventing Amazon, for example, from being able to compete with third-party sellers on its own marketplace. That legislation was a product of a 16-month House antitrust investigation into the tech industry that concluded, in 2020, that many of the biggest tech companies were effectively monopolies.

For a brief moment this month, lawmakers seemed poised to pass a bill that could force Meta, Google and other platforms to pay news organizations a larger share of ad revenues. But the legislation stumbled after Meta warned it could have to drop news content from its platforms altogether if the bill passed.

Time and again, Silicon Valley’s biggest players have maneuvered expertly in Washington, defending their turf from lawmakers keen to knock them down a peg.

Government decisions about rules on tech platforms have called into question how those rules will affect different aspects of the economy such as small businesses or the future of the internet.

In some cases, as with proposals to revise the tech industry’s decades-old content moderation liability shield, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, legislation may raise First Amendment issues as well as partisan divisions. Section 230 of the Communications Decadence Act of 1990 gives social media companies a free pass to leave hate speech and offensive content unaddressed, while Republicans want to change the law in order to make Platforms responsible for less offensive content.

The cross-cutting politics and the technical challenges of regulating an entire sector of technology, not to mention the potential consequences for the economy of screwing it up, have combined to make it genuinely difficult for lawmakers to reach an accord.

On the Future of Mobile Social Media Research and Teaching: How Universities Can Survive the State-by-State Cuts and Where to Pay for Mobile Data

It’s vital to establish a Republican brand. “Republicans now all agree that they should stand up to China”, said Kousser, a professor of political science at U.C. San Diego.

Social media research and teaching have become staples in academia and higher education curriculums. The app has fundamentally changed the nature of modern communication with its aesthetics, practices, storytelling, and information-sharing.

A platform built around short, creative and informational videos, with opportunities to express themselves and connect with others, is what they believe would be lost without TikTok.

The world keeps turning as these states implement their bans, leaving their citizens disadvantaged in a fast-paced media world. The states will have a disadvantage in applying for jobs, because their peers from other states will be able to learn more and better skills, while media and communications students will not.

Professors do research as well. Social media scholars in these states quite literally cannot do what they have been hired to do and be experts in if these bans persist. While university compliance offices have said the bans may only be on campus Wi-Fi and mobile data is still allowed, who will foot that bill for one to pay for a more expensive data plan on their phone? No one answers the question. While working at home is still an option for professors, they are also expected to be on campus often to show that they are actually working. This means any social media professor attempting to research TikTok on campus will have to rely on video streaming via mobile data, which can be quite expensive, either through having to individually pay for unlimited data, or accidentally going over one’s limits.

TikTok: A Social Media Platform for Teens to Talk about their Daily Life in the U.S. and How to Make the Most of It

The British Virgin Islands are very popular among tourists and a lot of searches were placed on what to wear, eat and do in between visiting the islands.

The thirtysomething Connecticut couple – she grew up in the US and he’s from Nigeria – share short musings about daily life, including their cultural differences from growing up on opposite sides of the world. They say that TikTok has pros and cons like all social media platforms.

To her it’s a one-stop shop for a wide range of content, from mental health advice to product reviews, all presented in bite-sized clips that don’t require plowing through blocks of text.

She has over 1.5 million followers onInstagram and sometimes she crosses-posts her TikTok videos there. Many other teens watch a lot of TikTok. Some days, she says she falls asleep to TikTok videos – anything with cuddly puppies or tasty-looking recipes.

TikTok has penetrated the U.S. culture. Take for instance a trip to grocery chain Trader Joe’s, which features an “as seen on TikTok” section promoting foods made popular by TikTok. Or, for example, Barnes & Noble stores, with tables dedicated to #BookTok. And, of course, TikTok has perhaps had the most obvious influence on the music industry; trending songs on TikTok find commercial success and land at the top of the charts.

Saman Movassaghi Gonzalez and her lawyers market the law in Miramar, FL: From short clips to flying superheroes and skits on TikTok

Saman Movassaghi Gonzalez, an immigration attorney in Miramar, Florida, uses TikTok to market her law practice to her 83,000 followers. Her short videos offer a light take on an otherwise heavy subject: In one, an image of her morphs into a fiery superhero who takes flight. “Me on my way to get my client out of immigration deportation/removal proceedings,” the caption reads.

Sometimes she dances to immigration facts that are on the screen. The 42-year-old says she’s gained some clients though the app, and checks it hourly to stay on top of messages.

It is in keeping with my personality. Gonzalez says there are a lot of ways to show off your personality, whether it is short clips, skits or dances. I like spreading information and trying to make it fun and entertaining.

The app is especially popular with young people. A majority of its users are Gen Z, and a third of them are under 19, according to an assistant professor at Tilburg University in The Netherlands.

And while TikTok provides resources on mental health, Shahin says it and other social media platforms can heighten attention deficiency, anxiety and depression.

The social media company TikTok recently introduced a default one-hour daily screen time limit for users under the age of 18 in one of the most aggressive attempts yet to prevent teens from scrolling. It rolled out a feature that aimed to offer more information to users about why its powerful algorithm recommends certain videos. And the company pledged more transparency to researchers.

The White House told TikTok that it must either remove ByteDance from the US market, or face severe punishment, including a possible ban.

Taccara and Yinka Lawanson, a couple who go by Ling and Lamb on TikTok, have 3.7 million followers on the platform. They referred to it as fast food when they first joined.

Jay Calvert: The Rise of Gen Z and Why We Are Having a Better Life On TikTok, and What Do They Mean to Hear About It?

They said in an email to CNN that the app made them feel free to be playful and goofy with no one judging them. “It was the app that in 60 seconds or less allowed the user the opportunity to go viral and become a star – which other platforms did not offer at the time.”

Phillip Calvert, a Milwaukee resident who goes by PhilWaukee on TikTok, downloaded the app when he lived in Shanghai, China, in 2018. He says social media sites were blocked in the country, and he didn’t have much choice.

People don’t even ask for my social media handles anymore. Calvert believes the app, with its steady diet of digestible videos, has become Gen Z’s alternative to television.

A 30-year-old man with a penchant for travel videos and other content earns his living by posting on TikTok. He says he earned his first TikTok payment from a Black History Month partnership.

The creators agree that if they are barred from TikTok, they will not be mourning too much. They’ll move on to the next shiny social platform.

The CEO of TikTok is going to warn users about a possible ban in the lead up to Thursday’s congressional hearing. The video was posted to the official account of the ByteDance subsidiary.

Mark Warner, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was considering a bill to ban more applications that are classified as high risk for security issues, according to reports.

The app, owned by ByteDance, Inc., has been under fire since the Trump administration, when the former president signed an executive order to enforce a nationwide ban of the app, but ByteDance sued and it never went through.

Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) demanded that Apple and Google “immediately” remove TikTok from their app stores in a letter addressed to the companies’ chief executives, Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai, Thursday.

The CEO of TikTok, in an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit last year, described how the company would be moving its data from Virginia and Singapore to the US with the help of a new subsidiary.

When Rob Joyce, the National Security Agency’s director of cybersecurity, was asked by reporters in December to articulate his security concerns, he offered a general warning rather than a specific allegation.

What is Apple trying to tell us about China? Some perks of Apple’s recent charm offensive on the tech sector — and what does it have to say about China

Unlike Google, Apple has a lot to lose regarding its relationship with both the US and China. Much of Cook’s success at Apple can be attributed to his ability to maintain working relationships with the Chinese government and manufacturers.

Some observers expect Washington to take action. “We will see limitations this year,” says Mira Ricardel, a former White House deputy national security adviser now at the Chertoff Group advising businesses on regulations. There is a collective view that will lead to something. This is what it might look like.

India’s TikTok blockade is permeable. Net Block’s report says that some small internet service providers allow access. And Ram Sundara Raman, lead developer for the University of Michigan’s Censored Planet project, says he was able to watch videos during a visit to India using the app he had downloaded in the US. The ban has made many Indian users migrate to rival services, including from Goggles and Facebook, which has led to turmoil for influencers who built businesses on TikTok.

The order from Trump would have barred app stores from distributing TikTok and cloud providers from doing business with the company nearly two months later. Penalties could have been imposed if people or companies were caught dodging the order. “We wanted to start at the root, where it comes into the US, and extract it that way,” says Ivan Kanapathy, who was China director for Trump’s National Security Council and is now vice president at policy consultancy Beacon Global Strategies.

New transparency tools on the app, rapid-fire meetings in Washington with TikTok’s CEO and a first-ever tour to members of the media of its corporate campus are just a few of the perks of the company’s recent charm offensive.

“There’s a lot of performative action going on,” said Adam Segal, a Chinese technology policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. He said that it was a desire to show “toughness” on China.

“But there’s also a lot of pent-up animosity toward social media broadly and its affect on children, U.S. democracy and misinformation, and it’s easier to take it out on Chinese-owned TikTok right now than it is, say, Facebook or Twitter,” Segal added.

During the Trump administration, TikTok was scrambling to find a cloud server in the U.S. in order to keep the app out of the United States.

Are High-Level Background Checks needed to Obtain the Services of the US Department of State? — Comment on the TikTok Plan

USDS is expected to hire 2,500 people who have undergone high-level background checks similar to those used by the U.S. government, TikTok officials said on Tuesday. None of the people hired would be Chinese.

There is no law in the US that clearly states what access employees of Beijing or Moscow have to the data of US citizens who use their services. And, there is currently no federal law discouraging the overcollection of critical data or personally identifiable information.

Jim Lewis, a security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that it was not certain that the plan would be approved.

Lewis said that theOracle plan would work. “This kind of thing is pretty standard. A reasonable solution might not suffice as TikTok has become so emotional.

A sale would be very challenging because most tech firms could not afford it. It is possible that TikTok is worth tens of billions of dollars. Then there are the legal challenges that a forced divestiture would likely trigger. The Council on Foreign Relations said that selling TikTok could constitute a violation of China’s export control laws.

Project Texas: Monitoring User Data with a Game-Theoretical Look at TikTok’s Transparency and Accountability Center

Segal agreed that the deal will resolve most of the data security concerns by allowing inspections and transfers of U.S. user data to Oracle.

There have been a lot of details in the media about Project Texas but Tuesday’s meeting was the first time the company has given an official presentation.

On Tuesday, TikTok officials led journalists through its Transparency and Accountability Center, which felt something like an interactive public relations museum.

Then there was a game of sorts that put people in the position of a TikTok content moderator, where they decided if a video violated TikTok’s rules or not.

The facilities will also feature server rooms where visitors who sign non-disclosure agreements can review TikTok’s entire source code, though journalists are not given an opportunity to do this.

Tech journalist Casey Newton of the newsletter Platformer said the content moderation game brought home just how tricky it is for the thousands of people who have to make trade-offs every day on an endless flood of videos, but it was largely beside the point.

“We hope that by sharing details of our comprehensive plans with the full Committee, Congress can take a more deliberative approach to the issues at hand,” the TikTok spokesperson added.

Would you not weaponize data if you wanted to fly a balloon over your airspace and people would see it? Or use an app that’s on the phone of 60 million Americans to drive narratives in society that try to influence political debate in this country?” says Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Marco Rubio, a Republican from Florida.

“There’s no question about the fact that they are trying to gather as much data as they can about all aspects of our country, and even the most minuscule, small items can add up to providing them with more data,” says Republican senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota. There is a large amount of data that will never be touched, but it is small pieces that add up. They are working it. They are patient. They see us as a threat and they are collecting data.

“None of the suggested … efforts were particularly relevant to my concerns,” senator Michael Bennet, a Democrat of Colorado, told congressional reporters after hosting Chew in his office last week.

Why is Silicon Valley Bank in a digital age? The Canadian Privacy Watchdog Sentiment to Canada’s Motion to End TikTok

Canada will not allow government-issued mobile devices to be used for video sharing app TikTok, it was announced Monday.

Last week, Canada’s federal privacy watchdog and its provincial equivalents in British Columbia,Alberta and Quebec decided to investigate whether the app complies with Canadian privacy legislation.

Recent media reports have also raised concerns about potential Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections, prompting opposition parties to call for a public inquiry into alleged foreign election interference.

Gen. Paul Nakasone said in his testimony that when there is a large audience, you can turn off the message.

“Our status has been debated in public in a way that is divorced from the facts of that agreement and what we’ve achieved already. A comprehensive national security plan for the American people is what Brooke Oberwetter from Tik Tok said would be delivered.

A bipartisan Senate bill that Virginia Democrat Mark Warner and South Dakota Republican John Thune are expected to unveil on Tuesday would give the Commerce Department authority to develop “mitigation measures,” up to and including a ban, to meet the risk posed by foreign-linked technologies.

Like the US government push to ban hardware and other gear made by Huawei, another Chinese technology giant, US officials are often short on specifics when asked to show public proof of collusion between the Chinese government and ByteDance.

The director of the Cybersecurity division at the National Security Agency says people are always looking for the “smoking gun” in technology. I think it’s a loaded gun.

Kaine, who serves on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is one in a bipartisan group of US senators who are demanding briefings from intelligence officials and tech experts. These lawmakers fear that US financial institutions could be vulnerable to social-media-induced bank runs and that malicious actors could use misinformation and bots to manipulate public opinion and create chaos in the financial system.

Silicon Valley Bank was unable to pay back depositors because it didn’t have the capital it needed, after it became clear it had made a bad bet. Some analysts say the bank’s demise was caused by its customers spreading gossip on social media, which drove a panic.

The Spy Balloon Drama and TikTok: When Social Media Becomes an Inappropriate Tool to Attack a Bankruptcy

“I’m nervous,” Kaine says while walking onto the Senate floor, his voice dropping as if he doesn’t want too many people at the Capitol to overhear. I believe that I am nervous.

Banking regulators have been aware of social media’s potential to drive wild movements in public markets since 2021, when shares in Gamestop, a video game retailer, shot from $20 to $483 over a two-week period, before plummeting back down. The SEC said that investment forums were to blame for the episode.

In recent years, members of the Intelligence Committee have received a number of briefings on the potential for manipulating US markets with deepfakes.

“Foreign actors have been using social media to harm America at least since 2016, as we have evidence of what they tried to do to disrupt our election,” says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat. Russia, China, and Iran use social media to divide Americans and undermine our civility, and that’s what they do. So yes, that’s a risk.”

We also learn that TikTok has 7,000 American employees, which is less than the 10,000 or more that TikTok aimed for in 2020 but a big leap over the 1,400 US headcount that year.

Republican McCaul referred to TikTok as “spy balloon in your phone”, and another Republican called him “digital Fentanyl”.

The broadening concerns about China’s massive intelligence capabilities are an increasingly frequent topic in Washington – especially in relation to the spy balloon drama and TikTok, and they were also due to spill over into talks on Friday between Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in Ottawa.

An Address to the Congressman That The App App Store Would Not Go Dark: How American Small Business Owners Learn to Read on TikTok

The congressman told CNN that he thought the app wouldn’t go dark. He believes a sale is most likely.

At a Harvard Business Review conference earlier this month, in which professors and artists spoke about emotional intelligence and corporate leadership, an attempt was made to save his company by his owner, Shou Chew.

The public was allowed to hear from the Chew, who has very few interviews. Yet his company’s app is among the most popular in America, with more than 150 million active users.

A press conference is planned for Wednesday with dozens of social media creators on the steps of the Capitol, some of whom have been flown out there by TikTok. The company is paying for a blitz of advertisements for a Beltway audience. There was a docuseries last week about American small business owners who rely on the platform for their livelihoods.

The inspiring stories of American small business owners were spotlighted. The first of the 60-second clips features a Mississippi soap maker with a deep Southern accent who built her company on the app, and the second features an educator who quit his job to focus on sharing informational videos on TikTok aimed at teaching toddlers how to read.

The list of expected attendees includes a disabled Asian American creator using her platform to combat ableism, a small business owner from South Carolina who launched a greeting card company via TikTok, and an Ohio-based chef who built her bakery business via the app. Some of the creators have hundreds of thousand or even millions of followers on TikTok.

The Rise and Fall of Tiktok’s Recommender Algorithms: How China has Done It, and Why China Needs It

Sherman thought that the PR push would not be as persuasive due to how divided Washington is.

The senior fellow for emerging technologies at the German Marshall Fund said that by and large, TikTok’s lobbying efforts have been pretty ineffective.

The top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China says that there has been more attention given to the problem.

Starting in March 2022, an unprecedented regulation came into effect requiring internet companies to register recommendation algorithms with the Cyberspace Administration, the powerful internet regulator that reports to President Xi Jinping.

“It also seems extremely unlikely that Beijing will accept any deal that removes TikTok’s algorithm[s] from its direct control and regulatory authority,” he said.

The success of Tiktok is believed to be based on its algorithms. The algorithms give recommendations based on users’ behavior, thus pushing videos they actually like and want to watch.

The state media in China reported a commentary by a professor of trade at the university who said updated rules meant ByteDance would need a license from Beijing to sell its technology.

“Some cutting-edge technologies might impact national security and public welfare, and need to be included in [export control] management,” Cui Fan told Xinhua.

The China-American Digital Media Regulator: What does your platform need to be banned? A response to the hearing on Bytedance, which is sponsored by TikTok

A senior official in the Chinese media regulatory agency visited Bytedance last week. He urged the company to improve the use of “recommendation algorithms” to spread “positive energy” and strengthen the review of online content, according to a statement from the regulator posted on its website.

At the beginning of 2023, rules governing “deep synthesis algorithms” also took effect. They will restrict the use of AI- powered image and audio software. Such technologies underpin popular apps such as ChatGPT.

The true test is whether or not user data can be ring-fenced and privacy and security can be achieved through data segregation and other means.

As for a solution, Silvers expects both sides to try to “finesse a compromise” where US concerns are addressed, but Beijing still retains control over TikTok.

The hearing, which lasted for more than five hours, kicked off with calls from a lawmaker to ban the app in the United States and remained combative throughout. It showed a picture of the opposition to the popular short-form video app as well as the company’s struggle to improve relations with Washington.

“Your platform should be banned,” was one of the first things Chew heard when the hearing started. In her opening statement, Chair McMorris-Rodgers mentioned that. Her mind seemed to be made up as did many of the Congress members on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and she was berated for everything from TikTok challenges to NyQuil chicken.

The attempts by Chew to stress that his company is not connected to the Chinese government seemed to fail. Many members of congress interrupted the chief executive’s testimony to say they do not believe him.

Chew said that he had seen no evidence of this happening. “Our commitment is to move their data into the United States, to be stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel. The risk is similar to any government going to an American company asking for data.

“We are committed to be very transparent with our users about what we collect,” Chew said. I don’t think what we collect is more than other players.

Rep. Latta, Rep. Bilirakis, and Rep. Cárdenas blasted TikTok’s response to the “Blackout Challenge”

Rep. Bob Latta, a Republican from Ohio, accused TikTok of promoting a video on the so-called “blackout challenge” or choking challenge to the feed of a 10-year-old girl from Pennsylvania, who later died after trying to mimic the challenge in the video.

Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida also said there is a lack of adequate content moderation, which leaves room for kids to be exposed to content that promotes self harm.

He said that it was unacceptable that you still claim that TikTok is something grand to behold even after knowing all the dangers.

Rep. Tony Cárdenas, a Democrat from California, blasted what he saw as Chew’s indirect responses and compared him to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in his own testimonies in the past has also frustrated some members of Congress.

“You have been one of the few people to unite this committee,” Cárdenas told Chew. You remind me a lot of the guy. I told my employees that he was similar to Fred Astaire, a good dancer with words. And you are doing the same today. A lot of your answers are a bit nebulous; they’re not yes or no.”

CNN has learned that Chew has been busy the last week preparing for Thursday’s appearance. The personnel of TikTok have been working to improve Chew’s presentation. They have played the roles of lawmakers with various questioning styles, peppering Chew with practice queries and scenarios to ready him for hours of relentless interrogation.

The hearing was weird and brutal because of their obsession with communism, their condescending tone, and their assumption that Chew was Chinese despite his reminders. The people on TikTok took notice.

What has CFIUS(09) to offer Congress on Digital Data Security? A frustration of the tech world after a big bang with TikTok

“Broadly speaking, some transactions can present data security risks — including providing a foreign person or government with access to troves of Americans’ sensitive personal data as well as access to intellectual property, source code, or other potentially sensitive information,” a Department spokesperson said. “CFIUS, on a case-by-case basis, will ensure the protection of national security, including to prevent the misuse of data through espionage, tracking, and other means that threaten national security.”

A lot of the risks that are pointed out are hypothetical and theoretical. I haven’t seen any evidence. I am eagerly awaiting discussions where we can talk about evidence and then we can address the concerns that are being raised.”

That was the question on everyone’s mind after the social media company’s chief executive waffled before US lawmakers on Thursday.

But it was striking how the TikTok chief flailed under aggressive questioning from both Republicans and Democrats, uniting the parties in a way that is rarely ever seen in American politics anymore. “Mr. Chew, welcome to the most bipartisan committee in Congress,” Republican Rep. Buddy Carter said. Democratic Rep. Tony Cárdenas echoed, “You have been one of the few members to unite this committee.”

To be clear, quite a few members of Congress were simply not interested in the facts. They were not going to be moved by anything Chew said. They had some talking points that were going to be used as cameras were rolling. They couldn’t care less about technical talk related to Oracle. It wasn’t going to have an effect on how they behaved.

The idea of a congressional hearing is to get people in your corner so that you have the political capital to push through bills that you have written. But sometimes you just look like a dumbass, and Congress looked thunderingly out of touch yesterday. Their plan to gain political capital wasn’t appreciated by users of TikTok. The representatives that lectured the users about the dangers of the app wrapped it up with weird rhetoric to make them look terrible to their audience.

The Communist Party of China, its Founder and Chairman, Alex Stamos, and the Stanford Internet Observatory: Privacy and the Future of Social Media

Alex Stamos is the founder and director of the Stanford Internet Observatory as well as being a founding partner of the Krebs Stamos Group. Alex was the chief security officer of Facebook and the CIO at Yahoo before he launched the SIO. His views are his own. Read more opinion on CNN.

We are at the beginning of a long struggle between the world’s democracies and a coalition of autocracies, led by the Communist Party of China and it’s leader who is the most autocratic leader in more than 40 years.

Chinese President XI jinping’s visit to a battered, beleaguered Putin only highlighted his new role as the Chinese leader publicly legitimized a Russian president indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes only last week. In the South China Sea, Taiwan Strait and disputed Japanese waters, China’s rapidly growing military continues to push boundaries and prepare for conflicts with its neighbors and the West.

Legislators on both sides of the aisle talked about the possibility that the platform could be used by the Chinese Communist Party to gather intelligence on millions of Americans. Members were also preoccupied with the possibility that young, developing American minds could be shaped by a torrent of Chinese-made content or information that could suppress US principles of political freedom and human rights or create confusion or false narratives about American foreign policy.

Congress needs to pass a privacy law. Congress and President Biden should create predictable rules and take control of tech regulation because of the state privacy laws popping up across the US without addressing fundamental issues. And in doing so, Congress can explicitly define the kinds of critical data that can be stored or accessed in the US, in our democratic allies, in neutral countries and in our adversaries.

Congress can also set a legal floor to the transparency social networks provide to civil society and academic researchers around the public content they are carrying. These groups are working with American social media companies to find campaigns that manipulate both American and global politics in order to inform citizens about the types of campaigns that may target them.

The company does keystroke logging to identify bots, but it does not track what users say. He also repeatedly noted that TikTok does not collect more user data than most of its peers in the industry.

What do we really need to learn about China from a public opinion piece of social media? Commentary on the letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew

The US and its allies need to seriously participate in the information war, by protecting and supporting journalists, who are able to operate independently, and by building civil society coalitions that will counter Chinese-style censorship in countries such as India and Turkey.

Washington should plan for the next 20 moves and see the whole board in response to the risks posed by a single piece of TikTok. The history of the rest of the 21st century depends on it.

The laws in question are extraordinarily broad, according to western legal experts, requiring “any organization or citizen” in China to “support, assist and cooperate with state intelligence work,” without defining what “intelligence work” means.

At the hearing, Chew told them that TikTok and Citizen Lab were saying a version of the same thing. “Citizen Lab is saying they cannot prove a negative, which is what I’ve been trying to do for the last four hours,” he said.

TikTok has faced claims that its in-app browser tracks its users’ keyboard entries, and that this type of conduct, known as keylogging, could be a security risk. The privacy researcher who performed the analysis last year, Felix Krause, said that keylogging is not an inherently malicious activity, but it theoretically means TikTok could collect passwords, credit card information or other sensitive data that users may submit to websites when they visit them through TikTok’s in-app browser.

Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, a hacker and former head of security forTwitter, said that the companies should have trust in them. We probably shouldn’t. It’s because of a concern about the governance of these companies.

Lin told CNN that TikTok and other social media companies’ appetite for data highlights policy failures to pass strong privacy laws that regulate the tech industry writ large.

The five-hour questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Chew showed that China is being increasingly viewed as a challenge to America’s values and way of life, much like the Soviet Union was.

The recent sequence of events has caused a long anticipated clash between the existing superpower, the United States, and rising one, China, to be a reality for millions of Americans.

The opposition to China has become one of the most important organizing principles of Washington politics and is a common issue that both parties share. But the tone of some of the questions and the disrespect shown to Chew also explained why some Asian American groups are worried that fierce hostility toward Beijing in Washington could translate into more intimidation and violence against Asian Americans across the country.

It is apowerful propaganda machine if it is used that way. This machine is an incredible source of misinformation. I’m not saying they’re doing it right now, but that potential, if President Xi in China wants to somehow invade … Taiwan, and suddenly folks not only in America but around the world are starting to see videos that reinforces that kind of message, that is a propaganda tool that makes every other possibility pale.”

He opened a packet of notes while sitting before a group of committee members. Many of the lawmakers who were prepared to question him had already made up their minds about whether the app was safe for Americans.

The Facebook ban on short-form social media feeds is a huge distraction for content creators and users, writes Mogharbi

In Cambridge Analytica’s case, Facebook settled with the Federal Trade Commission for $5 billion. The scandal kickstarted legislative debate over a federal data privacy network. Years later, Congress has yet to approve any meaningful data protections governing US or foreign-owned social media companies.

Many of the largest US social media companies have spent years copying TikTok’s features, which would make a shift away from the platform easier for its creators and users. In 2020 it introduced its own shortform video tool called Reels. Snapchat has Spotlight, YouTube has Shorts and even Spotify has a TikTok-like video feed with recommended music and other content.

“Obviously, if a ban is approved and enforced, the content, user count and engagement, and likely ad dollars for Snap, Instagram, and YouTube will increase,” said Ali Mogharabi, an analyst at financial services firm Morningstar, in a recent investor’s note.

One company is getting a boost. The stock price of the company jumped in the days leading up to the appearance of TikTok before Congress.

“Most users will flock to where the content creators go next,” Su said. “Instagram, Snapchat, and Youtube Shorts stand to benefit the most as content creators will still prefer places where they can monetize their content.”

Smaller platforms have the chance to grab more ground, too. Short-form video platform Triller, which reportedly has over 450 million users, is actively courting popular content creators from TikTok with cash bonuses, partnerships and other incentives to switch platforms. Dubsmach and Clash are platforms that could be more appealing to creators.

In the investor’s note, Moghaharbi said that it could be difficult to attract users to TikTok if it was more trusted in the US.

The Chinese Disappearance: A Response to Ma in the Courts of the Law and the Technicolor Critique of the United States

The Chinese retaliated against their own citizens. When Jack Ma spoke against tech regulation, he disappeared just like the actress Fan Bingbing, who was convicted of failing to pay enough taxes.