TikTok frustrates officials over data
Biden administration has done little on social media app feared to be compromised by China
WASHINGTON — Early last year, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, met to discuss China and industrial policy. During their conversation, Rubio raised his worries about Beijing’s influence over TikTok, the Chinese-owned viral video app.
Under former President Donald Trump, TikTok had been embroiled in questions over whether it could compromise U.S. national security by sharing information about Americans with China. The issue, which was never resolved, was inherited by the Biden administration. Sullivan “shared our concerns,” Rubio said in an interview.
Their discussion was one of many that lawmakers have quietly had with government officials about TikTok since Biden took office. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said he had also been in “active conversations” with the administration about the app, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. And regulators and other government officials have been weighing what to do about it after scrutinizing other Chinese firms.
These behind-the-scenes conversations signal how tensions over TikTok have simmered in Washington. While the app appeared to fade as a political flashpoint after Trump left office last year, lawmakers and government officials have privately grown frustrated over the Biden administration’s lack of progress in policing TikTok and other Chinese apps that could leak data to Beijing.
That dissatisfaction has boiled over into public view in recent months, after new revelations from BuzzFeed and other news outlets about TikTok’s data practices and ties to its Chinese parent. Rubio and Warner have recently called for a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the app, while a regulator at the Federal Communications Commission publicly said TikTok should be booted from American app stores.
A group of Republican senators has also demanded answers from TikTok about who could access the app’s data. On Tuesday, officials in the House of Representatives told staff members that they did not recommend using or downloading the service, citing security concerns, according to an email obtained by the New York Times.
“It’s just not been a priority over there, unfortunately, and I hope it will become one with the new revelations,” Rubio said of the Biden administration’s progress on TikTok.
The bipartisan scrutiny of TikTok, effectively at its most intense since Trump tried to force the app’s sale to an American buyer in 2020, is mounting as the platform grows ever more popular. With more than 1 billion users, TikTok has become a prime engine for cultural phenomena, like the scores of young people who posted last month about dressing in suits to see the latest Minions movie. Today, 67 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States use the app, according to a report last week from the Pew Research Center.
TikTok has fought back against the new scrutiny. Shou Zi Chew, its CEO, wrote directly to senators in July to “set the record straight” about the app’s data practices. Michael Beckerman, a TikTok executive who runs its multimillion-dollar lobbying apparatus, also went on CNN last month to defend the company.
In an interview, Beckerman called TikTok’s data collection “all very minor” compared with other social apps. To reduce security concerns, the app has said that it plans to store all its U.S. data solely on Oracle servers in the United States, deleting its backups in Singapore and Virginia, and managing access from the United States. The process, Beckerman said, would probably be finished this year. He did not offer a specific date.