The Chinese Communist Party is secretly lobbying the U.S. Congress regarding TikTok, according to Capitol Hill officials with knowledge of the situation.
The Chinese embassy is working to lobby against legislation that would force the sale of TikTok or otherwise ban Chinese apps in the United States, according to two Capitol Hill officials familiar with Chinese lobbying. He is said to be meeting with council officials. Said Politico.
TikTok banned (Anadolu/Getty)
Shou Zi Chew, CEO of TikTok Inc., during an interview at TikTok’s offices in New York, U.S., Thursday, February 17, 2022. (Christopher Goodney/Bloomberg/Getty)
After the bill was overwhelmingly passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in March and sent to the Senate for review, Chinese diplomats reportedly visited a Capitol Hill office on behalf of TikTok. They reportedly met and lobbied.
Congressional staffers, one in the House and one in the Senate, told Politico that the Chinese embassy initially did not mention TikTok when it sought a meeting at the Capitol. said.
Staff members told the media anonymously that they were not allowed to release this information to the public.
As reported by Breitbart News, the bill that could end up on the president’s desk would block TikTok unless its parent company, Chinese tech giant ByteDance, sells the app within six months. asking for it to be banned.
This is due to national security concerns, especially concerns about US users and data, given that ByteDance is beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
Notably, China’s attempt to lobby Congress comes after TikTok purchased $2.1 million in TV advertising in battleground states with the apparent purpose of interfering in the U.S. election.
TikTok has severed most ties with ByteDance and has repeatedly insisted that no U.S. user data ends up in the hands of China, but it has isolated such data from ByteDance executives based in China. However, former employees say otherwise.
As reported by Breitbart News, 11 former TikTok employees was interviewed Fortune said the app continues to work with ByteDance while telling a different story to the public.
As an example, a man who worked as a senior data scientist at TikTok said that around the time the app announced to the public that it would start storing U.S. data only in the United States and make it accessible only to U.S. employees. Ta. He was told that he would be reporting to an executive based in Seattle.
The only problem, he said, was that the American TikTok executive didn’t exist except on paper, and the former data scientist was told to continue working with China’s ByteDance executive.
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