TikTok: impossible to check whether members of the Chinese government view user data

According to TikTok, it is not possible to check whether members of the Chinese Communist Party view data from users outside of China. A TikTok top woman refused to answer questions about this during a hearing under oath in the US Senate.

TikTok coo Vanessa Pappas said in the hearing during a Republican senator’s questions that it is not possible to verify whether every Chinese employee of the company is a member of the Chinese Communist Party. Pappas admitted that employees in China have access to data of TikTok users. These are by definition users outside of China, because TikTok is not active in China. For this, parent company ByteDance has a separate app called Douyin.

Pappas stressed that employees who make strategic decisions within the company are not members of the Chinese Communist Party. The hearing discussed, among other things, the alleged links between TikTok and the Chinese government. TikTok is the first major social medium with a Chinese parent company. Many politicians believe that valuable user data can end up with the Chinese government as a result. The Indian government therefore banned TikTok a few years ago. This is not yet the case in other countries.

The questions came during a hearing where representatives from Meta, YouTube and Twitter were also present. Of those four, only Twitter wanted to say how many employees are engaged in moderation on its own platform: 2200. The other companies wouldn’t say that, even though they had already been asked in advance, reports TechCrunch.