The video-sharing app is owned by ByteDance, the privately held Chinese internet giant that is based in Beijing. Because-despite being an indisputable cultural catalyst that has 150 million monthly active users in the United States-TikTok is not an American product. On Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew went to Washington, D.C., and threw a wrench into this established tradition. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram have all been interrogated on Capitol Hill, scolded for being devil-may-care data vacuums, and then released back to their natural oat-milk-rich Silicon Valley habitats to keep making everyone-including the lawmakers who questioned them-more money. A good congressional paddling has become a rite of passage for nearly every major U.S.-owned social network. But if you’ve paid attention to the ballooning of big tech over the past two decades, you probably know it by heart. It’s not a particularly uplifting ritual. The average onlooker doesn’t really believe there will be meaningful reform to how tech companies operate. By the time the hearing is over, it’s clear that this was primarily an exercise in political theater. The CEO meets these grievances with vague promises of reform and an unlimited supply of I’ll get back to yous. It works in ways that House members don’t understand, but they know they don’t like it all the same. It’s vulnerable to disinformation and foreign interference. ![]() ![]() It’s both too “woke” and overflowing with hate speech. It’s addictive, psychologically damaging, and dangerous for kids. ![]() The complaints go something like this: The platform violates user privacy. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The CEO of a popular social media company walks into a congressional hearing, sits down in front of a bunch of cantankerous lawmakers, and gets treated like a political punching bag.
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