U.S. Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), joined by fellow Republican lawmakers, holds a press conference on the U.S. Capitol on March 24, 2023 in Washington, DC.
Kevin Dietsch | Getty Images
U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy said on Sunday lawmakers will move forward with laws to handle national security worries about TikTok, alleging China’s government had access to the short video app’s user data.
In the US, there are growing calls to ban TikTok, owned by China-based company ByteDance, or to pass bipartisan laws to present President Joe Biden’s administration legal authority to hunt a ban. Devices owned by the U.S. government were recently banned from having the app installed.
“The House will likely be moving forward with laws to guard Americans from the technological tentacles of the Chinese Communist Party,” McCarthy said on Twitter.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew appeared before a U.S. House Committee for about five hours on Thursday, and lawmakers from each parties grilled him about national security and other concerns involving the app, which has 150 million American users.
In Thursday’s hearing, the TikTok CEO was asked if the app has spied on Americans at Beijing’s request. Chew answered, “No.”
Republican Representative Neal Dunn then referenced the corporate’s disclosure in December that some China-based employees at ByteDance improperly accessed TikTok user data of two journalists and were now not employed by the corporate. He repeated his query about whether ByteDance was spying.
“I do not think that spying is the appropriate method to describe it,” Chew said. He went on to explain the reports as involving an “internal investigation” before being cut off.
McCarthy, a Republican, said in a tweet on Sunday, “It is very concerning that the CEO of TikTok cannot be honest and admit what we already know to be true — China has access to TikTok user data.”
The corporate says it has spent greater than $1.5 billion on data security efforts under the name “Project Texas” which currently has nearly 1,500 full-time employees and is contracted with Oracle Corp to store TikTok’s U.S. user data.
Fairly than appease lawmakers’ concerns, Chew’s appearance before Congress on Thursday “actually increased the likelihood that Congress will take some motion,” Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told ABC News on Sunday.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump lost a series of court rulings in 2020 when he sought to ban TikTok and one other Chinese-owned app, WeChat, a unit of Tencent.
Many Democrats even have raised concerns although haven’t yet explicitly backed a U.S. ban.
