The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is demanding answers and requesting documents from TikTok. This comes after the platform’s suspension of a think tank’s post about Beijing’s Hong Kong crackdown and pro-democracy leader Jimmy Lai. The committee is also probing recent reports that TikTok had for years kept a list of users who had watched LGBT-related content and tracked mentions of politically sensitive words on the platform.
“Each report raises serious concerns about the extent to which TikTok’s decisions continue to track the priorities of its owner, ByteDance, and, therefore, the Chinese Communist Party,” wrote Chairman Mike Gallagher and other GOP members of the committee in a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Chew yesterday, citing a report from National Review. ByteDance is deeply enmeshed in the CCP’s military-civil-fusion system, and the Chinese tech giant also hosts an internal CCP committee that promotes the party’s ideology.
In the letter, obtained exclusively by NR, the members asked that TikTok hand over documents related to its censorship and tracking of anti-CCP content on the platform by May 24. They also requested “an explanation of whether TikTok believes that Jimmy Lai’s detention comports with the rule of law or democratic principles and, if not, the implications of Mr. Lai’s detention for press freedom.” The committee has the power to issue subpoenas.
While TikTok has claimed that it acts wholly independently of the Chinese authorities, recent incidents have cast doubt on those assertions. Last week, Acton Institute’s TikTok account was suspended for over a day after it had posted six videos advertising The Hong Konger, a documentary about Jimmy Lai. After NR and other outlets reported on the suspension, TikTok restored the account, claiming that it had been suspended due to a “technical error.” At the time, TikTok spokesperson Jamal Brown told NR that the company is investigating the suspension.
“This seems to have been an attempt to silence my father’s story. This is yet another example of the CCP trying to stop people knowing what is happening in Hong Kong,” Sebastian Lai, the son of the pro-democracy stalwart, told NR.
The lawmakers also expressed skepticism of TikTok’s “stock answer” on censorship questions because “TikTok has never adequately explained how those censorship decisions were made in the first instance or given a complete and comprehensive explanation of how its community guidelines operate in practice.” TikTok has also censored, and subsequently restored under media pressure, the accounts of human-rights advocate Enes Kanter, Hong Konger journalist Kim Wong, and Feroza Aziz, a teenager suspended in 2019 after posting about Uyghurs.
“For every egregious decision that is reversed after a public outcry, there are likely many more such censorship decision that fly under the radar and therefore aren’t reversed,” the lawmakers added.
Brown did not respond to a request for comment about the letter yesterday.
Other subjects of the House Select Committee’s burgeoning investigation include ByteDance’s maintenance of lists of “sensitive words” that it tracks across its platforms, as Forbes revealed. Many of the lists have to do with topics sensitive to the CCP, such as Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong. One of the lists is called “TikTok comment Uighur blocked word.” The committee members also specifically requested documents on TikTok’s practice of “heating” content, a mechanism to boost certain videos, which was also reported by Forbes. They also requested all documents on TikTok’s practice of putting users who watch LGBT-related content on special tracking lists — a practice the company claims it curtailed in 2022 — which the Wall Street Journal also reported on last week.