TikTok said it cannot comment on ongoing
regulatory processes. But it said it “has made
clear that we have no higher priority than
earning the trust of users and regulators in the
U.S. Part of that effort includes working with
Congress and we are committed to doing so.”
After acquiring Musical.ly, Beijing-based
ByteDance merged it into TikTok. Musical.ly,
popular in the U.S. and Europe, had operated
out of offices in Shanghai and California.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) last month sent a letter
to Treasury requesting a CFIUS review of the
national-security implications of the Musical.
ly deal, saying there is “ample and growing
evidence” that TikTok is censoring content that is
not in line with the Chinese government. In the
letter, he said there had been questions about
why the app had so few videos of the recent
protests in Hong Kong.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Sen. Chuck
Schumer (D-N.Y.) later in October asked for the
U.S. intelligence community to assess national-
security risks of TikTok and other Chinese-owned
content platforms in the U.S. They said that while
TikTok says it stores U.S. user data in the U.S., the
company must still adhere to Chinese law on
supplying information to the government. Such
accusations have also been leveled against other
Chinese companies, including Huawei.
The senators also said that TikTok is a potential
target of foreign influence campaigns similar to
Russia’s attempts to undermine the 2016 U.S.
election on Facebook.
TikTok has said its data is not subject to Chinese
law and that it does not remove content based
on “sensitivities related to China.”