![]() ![]() According to Baker-White, a source close to the investigation said that the Justice Department’s Criminal Division is working on a probe with the Office of the US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and has already subpoenaed information from ByteDance.Īccording to Bloomberg, TikTok’s senior management has talked about the possibility of separating the company from its Chinese parent in a bid to assuage the US government’s concerns about national security, but see such a move as “a last resort,” not least because it would be very complicated. ![]() TikTok officials reportedly tried to use the app to track Baker-White’s movements, and those of a Financial Times journalist, in an attempt to determine how they got access to the documents that they used in their reporting. In a prior role at BuzzFeed, Baker-White reported on TikTok’s handling of data, including the fact that multiple ByteDance officials had accessed data on US users from inside China. According to recent reports, however, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (or CFIUS), an agency with the authority to review deals that might affect national security, has rejected this proposed solution, maintaining that it wants to see either a sale or a ban.Ī spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a recent briefing that the US has “so far failed to produce evidence that TikTok threatens US national security.” That may be so-but the FBI and the Department of Justice are now looking into reports that ByteDance staffers used the app to surveil several US journalists, including Emily Baker-White, who currently works at Forbes and who was first to report on the investigations last week. As I wrote last month, TikTok has spent more than a year developing Project Texas, which involves storing data related to US users on US servers belonging to Oracle, a cloud-computing service, and appointing a board of US advisers to oversee its recommendation algorithms, another focus of the US government’s concern. In an interview with the Journal last week, he argued that banning TikTok or forcing its owners to sell won’t accomplish anything that the company’s own proposed solution to US lawmakers’ concerns-an initiative known as Project Texas-doesn’t already achieve. Leading the effort is Jacob Helberg, a former Google policy adviser and member of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a congressional advisory panel.Ĭhew himself, meanwhile, has been laying the groundwork for his testimony. The Journal also reported that a group of Silicon Valley executives opposed to Chinese involvement in the US tech sector, including the investor and Trump confidant Peter Thiel, planned to meet for a private dinner yesterday, to talk about China. TikTok “is one of the most powerful tools that young people have to engage each other and to get civically involved,” Kohn-Murphy told the Wall Street Journal. About twenty influencers made the trip at the company’s expense, including Aidan Kohn-Murphy, a college freshman who has close to three hundred thousand TikTok followers and who also founded Gen-Z for Change, an advocacy group. As part of what Politico described as an “11th hour lobbying blitz,” TikTok invited some of its power users to Washington this week. In advance of Chew’s hearing, those for and against a TikTok ban have been drawing the battle lines. He also plans to say that ByteDance, the app’s Chinese owner, “is not an agent of China or any other country.” “We do not believe that a ban that hurts American small businesses, damages the country’s economy, silences the voices of over 150 million Americans, and reduces competition in an increasingly concentrated market is the solution to a solvable problem,” Chew will say. Based on a prepared version of his remarks that was released by the committee late Tuesday, Chew plans to focus on the fact that millions of small businesses in the US use TikTok, and also on freedom of expression. ![]() This morning, Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of the video-sharing app TikTok, will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee to respond to concerns about the app’s links to the Chinese government and its data-handling practices, as talk of a forced sale or outright ban gathers ( even more) steam in Washington. ![]()
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