No TikTok Leaders Have Ties To The Chinese Communist Party, COO Says In Heated Senate Hearing

TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas faced tough questions from U. S. senators in a hearing this afternoon about the social media giant’s ties to the Chinese government.

Senator Josh Hawley, citing reporting from Forbes , expressed frustration that Pappas would not say whether any Chinese employees working on TikTok are members of the Chinese Communist Party. Hawley asked: “Are there members of the Chinese Communist Party employed by TikTok or ByteDance, or no?” Pappas answered that no person who “makes a strategic decision at this platform” is a CCP member. But with respect to the rest of the app’s staff, she said the company does not vet its employees based on their political affiliations.

She noted that no other tech platform present at the hearing asks its employees what political parties they belong to. Hawley continued: “Would it surprise you to learn that Forbes Magazine recently reported that at least 300 current TikTok or ByteDance employees were members of Chinese state media?” Pappas reiterated that the company does not “look at the political affiliations of individuals. ” Visibly frustrated, Hawley said, “Your company has a lot to hide.

You’re a walking security nightmare, and for every American who uses this app, I’m concerned. ” The hearing, convened by the U. S.

Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, sought to assess social media’s impact on national security. Along with TikTok’s Pappas, executives from Google, Facebook and Twitter also testified about their companies’ policies on COVID-19 misinformation and child sexual abuse material. ( Disclosure: In a previous life, I held policy positions at Facebook and Spotify.

) With TikTok, though, the senators were focused on the app’s ties to China. TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have come under fire in recent months following reports that ByteDance employees in China regularly accessed sensitive U. S.

user data from TikTok, and that another ByteDance app, the now-defunct TopBuzz, promoted pro-China narratives to U. S. users.

(TikTok confirmed the first report; ByteDance denied the second. ) The app has since become the subject of a bipartisan investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee and a recently introduced bill in Congress. Hawley confronted Pappas with details from the report that employees in China had accessed U.

S. user data. “Is it your testimony that this is false?” he asked, “all of this is false?” Pappas said she disagreed “with the categorization in that article,” but conceded in a follow-up that China-based employees “have accessed [US users’] data.

Brendan Carr, an FCC commissioner who has called on Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, said on Twitter: “Tiktok testified under oath that it does not share data with the CCP. TikTok also testified under oath that it could not speak to whether the Beijing-based personnel it shares data with are members of the CCP. Both statements cannot be true.

” Pappas was also unwilling to promise that China-based employees would not have access to U. S. TikTok user data in the future.

Senator Rob Portman asked whether TikTok would commit to “cut off all data and metadata flows to China, China-based TikTok employees, ByteDance employees, or any other party located in China,” but Pappas twice declined to make that commitment. Instead, she invoked TikTok’s ongoing contract negotiations with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, stating that when finalized, the agreement “will satisfy all national security concerns. ” At the hearing, Senator James Lankford also asked Pappas about code within the TikTok app that can track users’ keystrokes — a finding that was also first reported by Forbes .

Pappas answered that the code was an anti-spam measure that did not collect the content of what users typed. One line of questioning notably absent from the hearing was about TikTok’s relationship to its parent company, ByteDance. While TikTok has assured U.

S. lawmakers that it does not share data with the Chinese government, ByteDance has not made such an assurance, despite prior reporting showing that ByteDance controls many of TikTok’s internal tools and has employees who work directly on TikTok. .