Anti-China TikTok Panic Derailed the Senate’s Big Tech Child Safety Hearing

Lawmakers grilled Big Tech executives on Wednesday in a congressional hearing that was supposed to be focused on the issue of child safety. But as parents stood behind the executives, holding photos of children that they said had died due to social media-related issues, the hearing frequently took bizarre turns into panic over TikTok’s Chinese parent company and the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

The spectacle was just the latest example of a moral panic over TikTok’s popularity in the U.S., and the specter of Chinese influence, overshadowing more immediate policy concerns. 

The Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featured testimony from CEOs including Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, X’s Linda Yaccarino, Discord’s Jason Citron, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew. In their opening statements, executives highlighted how their platforms try to combat the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and attempted to dispel the notion that social media negatively affects adolescents’ mental health. 

Lawmakers pushed back, with Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) asking the CEOs directly why they haven’t supported proposed laws such as the STOP CSAM Act, which has been criticized as being overbroad by rights groups such as the ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation. 

These are important discussions to have in public, but they quickly fell by the wayside when it came to TikTok. Immediately after Klobuchar, Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas) asked Chew whether TikTok, which is owned by Chinese company ByteDance, has shared user data with the Chinese government. 

In response, Chew rattled off TikTok’s usual response to this familiar line of questioning, which is that a majority of TikTok is owned by global investors and is committed to deleting user data and investing in U.S.-based infrastructure. Cornyn pressed Chew on a report from The Wall Street Journal that said TikTok is struggling to maintain this “firewall”; Chew disputed the report’s accuracy but said that the company would not dismiss such concerns. 

When TikTok came up again, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) accused TikTok of promoting “self-harm videos, and anti-Israel propaganda” in the U.S. Lawmakers have previously accused TikTok of intentionally promoting pro-Palestine content in a conspiratorial attempt to undermine the U.S. at the behest of the Chinese government. 

To illustrate his point, Cruz pointed to a report that found discrepancies between how certain topics perform on TikTok (such as Tiananmen Square and Hong Kong protests) versus Instagram, concluding that these topics are likely censored on the app. The study was described as fundamentally flawed by the Cato Institute, a point that Chew brought up in response. 

Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) launched into a line of questioning around the psychological effects of Meta’s products on teenagers that resulted in the most bombastic moment from the hearing: Zuckerberg stood up, turned around and apologized to parents in the room. When Hawley turned his attention to TikTok, however, the topic turned once again to China. “Why should your platform not be banned in the United States of America?” he asked. “Your platform is basically an espionage arm for the Chinese Communist Party.” 

Once again, Chew trotted out the company’s usual response to these common accusations, which is that the app is used by the majority of American citizens every day. 

“And every single one of those Americans are in danger” from the data that is collected by the app, Hawley responded, concluding that “your app should be banned” to applause from the audience. 

The questioning around TikTok’s relationship to the Chinese government continued from there. The only time anything relevant to the hearing’s topic was addressed to Chew again was when the CEOs were asked to divulge how many staffers they have dedicated to moderation, which Chew answered along with the other executives. 

It’s not as if there are absolutely zero concerns when it comes to TikTok and how it protects user data. However, experts have repeatedly pointed out that these are systemic issues related to how apps collect and sell user data that extend far beyond TikTok and even China. Indeed, the rise of data brokers means that any nation’s government—including U.S. intelligence agencies—can buy location and other data on users from poorly regulated third parties. This is not the conversation that most lawmakers are having around TikTok, as was the case during Wednesday’s hearing. 

It was surprising and more than a little bizarre how much time was dedicated to hand wringing over Chinese influence and national security at a hearing about child safety, especially in front of parents of dead children. 

There are issues related to child safety on TikTok to dig into; concerns have been raised in the past over grooming by adults on the platform, for example, which TikTok has implemented changes to address. Instead, we learned nothing, as the questions around China were the same ones that have been posed to TikTok over and over again, and which the company by now has well-practiced answers for.