TikTok’s CEO can’t catch a break from xenophobia in Congress

Today’s listening to on little one security was — principally — an unusually targeted affair. The Senate Judiciary Committee known as up the CEOs of X, Meta, Snap, TikTok, and Discord and grilled them for 4 hours on the potential risks their providers posed for youngsters. Many of the lawmakers emphasised emotional influence, enjoying to an viewers stuffed with households who’d had children focused by predators or in any other case harmed on-line.

But halfway by the listening to, it was dragged off beam by a predictable tangent: the truth that TikTok is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance. And a assembly ostensibly about holding children secure dipped into a now-familiar try to make TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew reply questions totally unrelated to the remainder of the day.

Although makes an attempt to ban TikTok final 12 months principally fizzled, there are actual issues about its information storage insurance policies and Chinese authorities affect over its moderation. Some lawmakers touched on them, asking Chew to supply an replace on Project Texas, its information safety initiative. (TikTok remains to be engaged on it.) But the questions additionally strayed into makes an attempt to easily spotlight TikTok’s un-American origins, culminating in Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) urgent Chew aggressively and repetitively on his citizenship — which, it’s broadly recognized, is Singaporean.

“You often say that you live in Singapore,” Cotton mentioned earlier than demanding to know the place Chew’s passport was from (Singapore, clearly) and whether or not he’d utilized for citizenship in China or the US (no, mentioned Chew). “Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party?” he then requested abruptly, as if hoping to catch Chew unexpectedly. Chew’s response wasn’t shocked a lot as fed up. “Senator! I’m Singaporean!” he reiterated. “No.” (Singapore just isn’t a part of China.)

The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell described Cotton’s line of questioning as “McCarthy-esque.” Chew’s relationship to China was already mentioned exhaustively when he appeared earlier than Congress final 12 months, and Cotton didn’t clarify what it needed to do with little one security right here. It’s not even essential to make the case that China may need undue affect over TikTok. Apple, for example, has weathered years of critiques about its relationship to the Chinese authorities; no cheap individual has ever recommended this hinges on Tim Cook being a secret communist. Instead, it’s a line of questioning that appears merely designed to play on Chew’s foreignness — even when it’s bought nothing to do with the subject at hand.