House China Committee presses TikTok to explain censorship and surveillance

House Select Committee on China lawmakers are pressuring TikTok to explain its censorship policies and surveillance practices amid growing concerns about the app’s restrictions on content and alleged spying on users.

The lawmakers want to know about TikTok’s suspension of the Acton Institute’s account, deletion of the free market think tank’s videos and TikTok’s alleged tracking of sensitive words and people who view gay content. 

A dozen of the House China Committee’s lawmakers wrote to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew saying they’re worried about the app being controlled, directed and influenced by Beijing’s priorities. 

“TikTok’s stock answer — that in some cases, it has reinstated content or halted a particular tracking technique — is inadequate 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,” the lawmakers wrote to TikTok in a letter. 

TikTok said last week that its suspension of the Acton Institute was the result of an error, and it restored videos to the account that were promoting the institute’s documentary about activist and entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, whom the Chinese government jailed. 

TikTok did not previously answer The Washington Times’ questions about what caused the error that restricted content about the documentary “The Hong Konger” and it did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday. 

Separate from its action against the Acton Institute, new details have emerged about TikTok’s alleged snooping on its users’ location and online behavior. 

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, operated a tool that tracked sensitive words and recorded who said it and where they were located, according to Forbes. A TikTok spokesperson told Forbes this month that the information the magazine reviewed may have been incomplete and outdated and that different policies and computer code apply for ByteDance products TikTok and Douyin, a version of TikTok used in China. 

Former TikTok employees told The Wall Street Journal that the app maintained a list of users who watched lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender content for at least a year. TikTok told the newspaper that a year ago it deleted a tool that employees used to access data. 

“All these actions reinforce the very serious concerns that members of Congress — including many select committee members — have repeatedly raised about the extent to which TikTok’s decisions, including decisions about content moderation, are subject to the influence, control or direction of the [Chinese Communist Party] and/or the [People’s Republic of China] government,” the lawmakers wrote to TikTok. “TikTok owner ByteDance’s deep links to the CCP are well established.”