Tick Tock, TikTok

The US thinks the Chinese-owned social media app is a major national security risk. TikTok is running out of ways to avoid a ban

- Alex Barinka and Anna Edgerton

On Feb. 1, TikTok’s top lobbyists thought the meeting on Capitol Hill was going well. Their slide presentation, which was meant to show how hard TikTok worked to prevent data generated in the US from ending up in China, was capturing the attention of their congressional antagonists—Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, and Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat.

This was the bipartisan duo leading a new House committee focused on China. They’d already sponsored a bill seeking to ban the app on the suspicion, commonly held in national security circles, that the Chinese Communist Party could use TikTok to track and manipulate Americans because it’s owned by a company based in Beijing, called ByteDance Ltd.

Krishnamoorthi asked a question TikTok was expecting: What about the law in China that forces companies based there to comply with any government data requests?

Michael Beckerman, TikTok’s well-coiffed head of US public policy, reassured Krishnamoorthi that users have nothing to worry about, according to two of the meeting’s attendees. TikTok is taking extreme measures to isolate its US operations. Beckerman said the company is housing data with an American partner, Oracle Corp., and has agreed to accept oversight from a US government-appointed board, in a $1.5 billion plan called Project Texas—all explained in slides on the iPad that the lawmakers were holding and that congressional staffers were straining to see.

The representatives were familiar with the plan. But they were also familiar with the loyalty China demands from its domestic companies. Gallagher asked: If China were to order TikTok to remove content about the government’s oppression of the Uyghur minority in Western China, what would TikTok do? Beckerman promised the content wouldn’t be censored, but he appeared flustered.