TikTok and its parent company have spent more than $13 million lobbying federal officials since 2019. Given that lawmakers are considering legislation that would target the app’s ownership by a Chinese visitor or a planned attempt to ban TikTok in the United States, this appears to have been in vain.
According to an individual letter to Buck, Buck’s staff got an irrefutable confirmation from Michael Beckerman about the high position of the web-based entertainment organization’s U.S. public approach shop, in February, when Conservative Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri presented a regulation that would forbid TikTok downloads across the country.
This individual claims that Beckerman supported the brand-new Project Texas initiative of TikTok and opposed Buck’s staff’s concerns that the company was harvesting consumer data. Project Texas is TikTok’s struggle to move its American customer data into a secure, Oracle-managed hub. This is done to dispel concerns that members of China’s ruling party or ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, could gain access to the data.
The visitor has been attempting to demonstrate that it is able to address concerns regarding user information without imposing a complete ban. However, the majority of lawmakers present at a contentious TikTok hearing this month appeared to be skeptical that Project Texas would instead address the issues raised by lawmakers who want to ban the app, which has 150 million users who use it on a monthly basis in the United States.
At the conference, TikTok Chief Shou Zi Bite said that ByteDance workers in China could have gotten a few pieces of American information from the application. However, he reassured them that employees would no longer have access to that data once Project Texas was completed.
Chew’s testimony and the persistent lobbying pressure have not hampered the efforts on Capitol Hill to cut TikTok’s ties to its Chinese owner and limit access to the app.
Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, did not deny any aspect of the story. She asserted that the visitor is attempting to express lawmakers’ concerns about privacy and safety and safeguard the TikTok team’s work in Washington.