TikTok is targeted in the US for being Chinese, not for what it has or has not done

National security concerns cited by Washington are tenuous at best – but then again, TikTok was never going to be treated equally to American platforms

The US propensity to regard anything China-related with suspicion will make life much harder for Chinese living in the US

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TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the US Congress on Capitol Hill on March 23 in Washington, DC. Photo: Getty Images / AFP

Leo Yu

Leo Yu is a clinical professor of law at Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

Published: 1:00am, 26 Mar 2023Updated: 3:39pm, 16 May 2023

What is the problem with TikTok? The US Congress unequivocally answered this question through a five-hour grilling on Thursday: it is China.

Let’s face it, the national security concern about TikTok appears to be tenuous at best. At the hearing where TikTok CEO Chew Shou Zi was questioned by US lawmakers, the only incident raised that can remotely support this concern is one in which some employees at TikTok’s parent company, the Beijing-based ByteDance, inappropriately obtained the data of American TikTok users, including two reporters. ByteDance acknowledged the wrongdoing and swiftly fired the responsible employees.

Nobody, including the US government, has alleged that the involved employees leaked the information of the American reporters to the Chinese government. To date, there is no public evidence that Beijing has harvested TikTok’s commercial data for intelligence or other purposes.

Nevertheless, this story has become a Chinese spy story. “China” appears 13 times in a Forbes report flashily titled, “EXCLUSIVE: TikTok Spied on Forbes Journalists”. This story evidently led to a US Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation.