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      in World Politics

      Will Democracy Survive the Rise of China?

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      in US Politics

      Montana becomes first US state to ban TikTok

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      Montana has became the first US state to ban TikTok after the governor signed legislation prohibiting mobile application stores from offering the app within the state by next year.The move is among the most dramatic in a series of US escalations against TikTok, which is owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance. TikTok has come under increasing scrutiny over its ties to China, amid concerns that such links could pose a national security threat.The federal government, and more than half of US states, have prohibited the app on government devices and the Biden administration has threatened a national ban unless its parent company sells its shares.The company has previously denied that it has ever shared data with the Chinese government and has said the company would not do so if asked.TikTok said in a statement that the Montana bill “infringes on the first amendment rights of the people of Montana by unlawfully banning TikTok”, and that the company intends to “defend the rights of our users inside and outside of Montana”.In March, TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was forced to defend his company’s relationship with China at a bipartisan congressional hearing, with lawmakers also grilling the CEO on the social network’s impact on the mental health of young people.TikTok is one of the world’s most popular social networks with more than 100 million US users, and questions remain about how such bans will be enforced and what their impact will be on creators who use the platform.Montana’s new law, which will take effect 1 January, prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state and would fine any “entity” – an app store or TikTok – $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users.Montana’s ban is expected to face legal challenges, and will serve as a testing ground for the TikTok-free America that many national lawmakers have envisioned.Gianforte also prohibited the use of all social media applications that collect and provide personal information or data to foreign adversaries on government-issued devices. Among the apps he listed are WeChat, whose parent company is headquartered in China; and Telegram Messenger, which was founded in Russia.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOpponents consider the measure to be government overreach and say Montana residents could easily circumvent the ban by using a virtual private network, a service that shields internet users by encrypting their data traffic, preventing others from observing their web browsing. Meanwhile, internet freedom advocates and others have criticized the US crackdown as amounting to censorship.Keegan Medrano, policy director for the ACLU of Montana, said the legislature “trampled on the free speech of hundreds of thousands of Montanans who use the app to express themselves, gather information and run their small business in the name of anti-Chinese sentiment”.NetChoice, a trade group that counts Google and TikTok as its members, called the bill unconstitutional.“This is a clear violation of the constitution, which prohibits the government from blocking Americans from accessing constitutionally-protected speech online via websites or apps,” Carl Szabo, who serves as the group’s vice president and general counsel, said in a statement. More

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      in US Politics

      Traffic review: Ben Smith on Bannon, BuzzFeed and where it all went wrong

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      Ben Smith is a willing passenger on the rollercoaster also known as the internet. He reported for Politico, was founding editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and did a stint as a columnist for the New York Times. Then he co-founded Semafor. Graced with a keen eye and sharp wit, he has seen and heard plenty.People and businesses crash, burn and sometimes rise again. BuzzFeed News is no more. The New York Times trades 75% higher than five years ago. Tucker Carlson is off the air. Roger Ailes is dead. Twitter ain’t what it used to be.Smith’s first book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral, captures the drama with light prose and a breezy tone. He observes that internet news morphed from being a vehicle for the left into the tool of the right. It’s a lesson worth remembering.Technology is agnostic. The market yearns to build the better mousetrap. Secret sauce seldom stays secret for long. Barack Obama demonstrated a then-unparalleled mastery of electoral micro-targeting; in turn, the first Trump campaign harnessed Facebook and social media in a manner few envisioned.Traffic is the narrative of an industry and its personas. Smith spills ink on the overlapping relationships between the late Andrew Breitbart, founder of the eponymous rightwing website, Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge. He stresses that ideology tethered to accessible if potentially inflammatory content gains eyeballs and clicks. Kittens are cute. Listicles are good for laughs. On the other hand, dick pics get stale quickly unless there’s a story behind them. Brett Favre is the exception that proves the rule.Smith recounts discussions with Steve Bannon, the dark lord of Trumpworld. He describes a Trump Tower meeting, amid the 2016 campaign. Bannon, then Trump’s campaign chairman, “exuded confidence, but it didn’t feel like a winning campaign”, Smith observes. “He didn’t seem to have much to do.”But there was more to the confab than atmospherics. There was insight.“Breitbart hadn’t just chosen Trump, Bannon told me, based on the candidate’s political views.” Rather, “Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement he’d driven, and attached themselves to it.”Charisma counts. Said differently, Hillary Clinton was only a candidate. Unlike Trump, she did not spearhead a movement, evoke broad loyalty or elicit passion. Bernie Sanders, the Brooklyn-born socialist, stood in marked contrast. And he didn’t give speeches at Goldman Sachs or summer on Martha’s Vineyard.Sanders connected with the white working class and Latinos. A creature of the beer track, he came within two-tenths of a point of beating Clinton in Iowa then clobbered her in New Hampshire. The Democratic primary extended into July. The performance of the senator from Vermont presaged Clinton’s election day woes.“BuzzFeed, in Bannon’s view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement,” Smith writes. “Why hadn’t we gone all in for Bernie, he asked me.”Smith’s answer satisfied no one, not even himself: “I told Bannon that we came from different traditions.”Greed, sex and ambition also marble Smith’s tale. Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange and a $10m investor in Semafor, faces a dozen federal criminal counts. The company plans to repurchase his shares. Tainted money is a flashpoint for aggrieved creditors.The pursuit of coolness, cash and desirability seldom respects boundaries. Like moths, journalists gravitate to flames only to be burned. In one chapter, Smith recalls the plight of BuzzFeed’s Benny Johnson.Johnson came from the Blaze, the hard-right brainchild of Glenn Beck, purveyor, Smith says, of “deranged conspiracies about Barack Obama before [Fox] pushed him out in 2011”. As for Johnson, he generated clickable copy. “He had a gift for traffic,” Smith writes. Johnson also had a plagiarism problem. In hindsight, he flashed warning signs. Apparently, Smith elected to ignore them.“I wasn’t really worried about whether Benny would fit in,” he admits. “I should have been.”Johnson was not another David Brooks or George Will. He was not “a bridge between BuzzFeed’s reflexive progressivism and the other half of the country”. Rather, Johnson crystallized something new, “a conservative movement more concerned about aesthetics than policy, motivated by nostalgia and culture more than by the overt subject matter of politics”.These days, owning the libs takes precedence over policy debate. Exhibit A: Marjorie Taylor Greene. Mien matters more than ever.Smith writes: “I sometimes wonder now if Benny was headed toward the kind of rightwing populism that Donald Trump came to embody.”Perhaps. Then again, “bullshit” and looks have always populated politics and the ranks of politicians. Smith’s words, again. After BuzzFeed, Johnson bounced to the National Review then on to the Daily Caller. He is now at Newsmax and Turning Point USA, the $39m non-profit led by Charlie Kirk.Elsewhere, Smith recalls an offer made by Disney in 2013, to purchase BuzzFeed for $450m with the “potential of earning $200m more”. Smith’s colleagues rejected the deal. The Disney chief, Bob Iger, exploded: “Fuck him, he loses, the company will never be worth what it would have been worth with us.”He was prescient.“By 2022, the internet had splintered,” Smith notes.America now faces a rerun of the last presidential election, Biden v Trump again.In his conclusion, Smith writes: “Those of us who work in media, politics and technology are largely concerned now with figuring out how to hold these failing institutions together or to build new ones that are resistant to the forces we helped unleash.”Rome wasn’t built in a day. Nor was the web. Sometimes, creative destruction is just destruction, slapped with a gauzy label.
      Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral is published in the US by Penguin Random House More

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      in US Politics

      Biden team to propose strict vehicle pollution limits to boost EV sales

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      The Biden administration will propose strict new automobile pollution limits requiring that all-electric vehicles account for as many as two of every three new vehicles sold in the US by 2032 in a plan that would transform the US auto industry.Under the proposed regulation, expected to be released by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Wednesday, greenhouse gas emissions for the 2027 through 2032 model years for passenger vehicles would be limited to even stricter levels than the auto industry agreed to in 2021.“This is a massive undertaking,” said John Bozzella, the president of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, told the New York Times, which first reported on the proposed limits. “It is nothing short of a complete transformation of the automotive industrial base and the automotive market.”The auto industry is expected to push back against the plan, which comes nearly two years after carmakers pledged to make electric vehicles comprise half of US new car sales by 2030 as part of a history-making transition from gasoline-powered engines to battery-powered vehicles. Environmental groups have applauded the ambitious limits proposed by the Biden administration.The proposal would require at least 54% of new vehicles sold in the US to be electric by 2030, four percentage points higher than the 2021 goal that the industry previously agreed to, and up to 67% of new vehicles by 2032. The 2021 agreement came after strong pressure from President Biden, who signed an executive order setting a target for half of all new vehicles sold in 2030 to be zero-emissions vehicles.The president also wants automakers to raise gas mileage and cut tailpipe pollution between now and model year 2026, which would be a significant step toward his pledge to cut US planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030.Electric vehicles accounted for only 7.2% of US vehicle sales in the first quarter of the year, but the share of EV sales is on the rise – last year it was 5.8% of new vehicle sales.The EPA declined to offer details ahead of Wednesday’s announcement, but confirmed in a statement that, as directed by Biden’s order, it is “developing new standards that will … accelerate the transition to a zero-emissions transportation future, protecting people and the planet”.The proposed regulation isn’t expected to become final until next year. More

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      in US Politics

      As the west tries to limit TikTok’s reach, what about China’s other apps?

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      As TikTok, the world’s most popular app, comes under increasing scrutiny in response to data privacy and security concerns, lawmakers in the west may soon set their sights on other Chinese platforms that have gone global.TikTok was built by ByteDance as a foreign version of its popular domestic video-sharing platform, Douyin. But it is far from being ByteDance’s only overseas moneymaker. The Chinese company owns dozens of apps that are available overseas, many of them English-language versions of Chinese offerings.CapCut is a video-editing app that is used by TikTok creators, while Lark is a workplace collaboration platform. Other apps, particularly e-commerce platforms such as Shein, have become hugely popular in the US and the UK.The US Congress is now considering the introduction of the Restrict Act, which would give the commerce department the power to ban TikTok and other apps that pose national security risks. Because the main concern about Chinese apps is that they are subject to interference from the Chinese Communist party, many household names could soon be in the line of fire.CapCutCapCut is the Chinese version of ByteDance’s JianYing. It was the fourth-most downloaded app globally in 2022, behind TikTok, Instagram and WhatsApp, according to Statista, which analyses market and consumer data.Despite the security concerns over TikTok, governments have said little about CapCut. India’s government is an outlier, banning the app in 2020 along with a host of others made by Chinese companies.First released in April 2020, CapCut has been downloaded more than 500m times on the Google Play store globally. On Apple devices, it was downloaded 25m times just last month, according to data analysts Sensor Tower. At times in 2021, CapCut was the most downloaded free app in the US.LarkLark, a workplace collaboration platform, launched in 2019. Its Chinese version is called Feishu, but the two platforms operate and store data separately, with Lark being managed from Singapore.It has already launched in the US, south-east Asia and Japan, and has plans to expand into Europe. Its target audience is multinational companies that work with China, or Chinese companies working overseas.Lark combines elements of Slack, Dropbox, Google Docs and Skype. It is a minnow compared with ByteDance’s other products, but is part of a strategy to diversify the company’s offering.Now, however, Lark’s future looks uncertain. It explicitly deals with the kind of proprietary data that western lawmakers and companies would want to keep secure. Ivy Yang, a China tech analyst who previously worked for tech firm Alibaba, said that, for years, Chinese apps pursued a strategy of developing “under the radar” before being discovered more widely. But, Yang said, “that trajectory has to shift because the American government doesn’t allow them to do that any more”.WeChatTencent’s WeChat – which has more than 1.1 billion users – is overwhelmingly used in China, where the all-encompassing app is essential for communications, bookings, finances, and even health monitoring during the pandemic.But it is popular in other countries, too, particularly for diaspora communities wanting to keep in touch with friends and family back in China. Disinformation is particularly rife on WeChat, in part because news spreads in private chat groups rather than on public feeds, so is harder to monitor.In 2022, it was downloaded more than 66m times in China, about 2.1m times in both the US and Indonesia, and more than 1m times in Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan.In September 2020, the then US president, Donald Trump, sought to ban WeChat and TikTok outright. This led to lawsuits and court-ordered stays on the ban, and in 2021 his successor, Joe Biden, withdrew Trump’s executive orders. Biden’s administration also launched national security reviews of apps created by companies with links to adversarial foreign governments such as China.WeChat is a Chinese-made app also used in the west, unlike TikTok, CapCut and others, which are western versions of Chinese apps. In 2021, WeChat said it had separated processes for its domestic Chinese users and those who log in with a foreign phone number.But in September last year, overseas users received pop-up messages warning them that “personal data [including] likes, comments, browsing and search history, content uploads, etc” would be stored on Chinese servers.SheinShein, pronounced “shee-in”, is the world’s largest fashion retailer. Founded in 2008 in Nanjing, last year it was the most-downloaded fashion and beauty app in the US, with more than 27m downloads, according to Statista.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionConsumers are turning to Shein because it is cheap. But, said Yang, it is also “a lot more fun”. Chinese e-commerce apps are “a lot more engaging”, with pop-ups offering discounts and deals to gamify the shopping experience.Despite the cheap prices, its revenues are huge. In 2022, it raked in $22.7bn (£18.2bn), putting it in the same league as established behemoths such as H&M and Zara. Rui Ma, a China tech analyst and investor, said that Shein’s core advantage was its supply chain. Unlike other fashion companies, Shein works directly with the material suppliers and factories, so it has a detailed understanding of its own pipeline. Ma said Shein’s inventory waste “is one-10th that of the industry average”, which allowed it to keep prices down.TemuTemu only launched in the US in September 2022, but by January this year it was the most popular app in the country. The e-commerce platform sells everything from wireless earphones for $5.09 to a cat’s toothbrush for $0.44.Its inventory is a core part of its business model: it prioritises lightweight products to reduce cargo costs, and ships to consumers directly from factories in China. This allows it to offer rock-bottom prices. It also requires vendors to offer products that are not available on other platforms.It is a subsidiary of PDD Holdings Inc, a Chinese company that also owns the Chinese internet retailer Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is the dark horse of the Chinese e-commerce market. Despite being much younger than Alibaba and JD.com, which dominate the industry, Pinduoduo has about 15% of the market share. Ma said PDD had “a team that is really good at execution, and they’re taking a lot of the Chinese advantages, and their knowhow, into expanding abroad”.Yang also notes that with US consumers being increasingly cash-strapped, they are willing to wait longer – Temu’s delivery times can be one to two weeks – for cheaper products. That is a challenge for US giants such as Amazon, which have prioritised speed of delivery above all else.AliExpressLast year AliExpress, the online marketplace of the tech giant Alibaba, was the third-most popular marketplace app in the UK, with 1m downloads, behind Amazon and eBay. Rather than working directly with factories, it connects small businesses in China with consumers around the world to sell cheap products, often in bulk.However, despite being backed by China’s leading e-commerce platform, AliExpress has failed to catch on in the west as successfully as newer rivals such as Temu and Shein. Yang said part of the reason for this was that it didn’t have the “laser focus” of its competitors. Yang said that AliExpress “was never really under pressure to thrive” in the west because Alibaba already had so many arms to its business, including Taobao, for shopping, and Alipay, a mobile payments system that is ubiquitous in China.What’s next for Chinese apps?In theory, many of the accusations that have been levelled against TikTok – such as that it is bad for children’s mental health or engages in censorship of political topics – should be less applicable to other Chinese apps that are popular in the west. Fast fashion and cheap cosmetics are less controversial than algorithmically delivered content that is seen as shaping young minds. And shopping apps like Temu and Shein are dependent on physical supply chains, so they are less able to change or mask their Chinese links.But US lawmakers have warned that any Chinese-owned apps could be vulnerable to data privacy breaches or interference from the Chinese Communist party.Some analysts have pointed out that the US does not have comprehensive data privacy laws, meaning that users of any apps have little control over how their data is used.Ma said: “It doesn’t make much sense to me that a shopping app is going to be put on the same level [of scrutiny] as a media app. But my view is that it’s not going to stop anyone from trying.” More

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      in US Politics

      White House ‘very in favor’ of bill thought to target TikTok

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      One of the authors of a Senate bill that would enable the federal commerce department to ban technologies with links to foreign governments has said that the Joe Biden White House is “very in favor” of the measure, but he stopped short of saying whether the president’s administration has discussed possibly prohibiting the Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok in particular.Appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said that the proposed legislation has also picked up support in his congressional chamber from 11 Democrats – of which he is one – as well as 11 Republicans.“I think the White House is very in favor of this bill,” said Warner, chairperson of the Senate’s select committee on intelligence. Without saying whether Biden’s administration would push for these steps to be taken against TikTok, Warner added: “We [would] give the secretary of commerce the tools to ban, to force a sale.”TikTok has drawn close congressional scrutiny because the data of users on the popular video sharing platform could be available to the government of China, the US’s rival global superpower. The Chinese firm ByteDance owns TikTok, and Warner said laws in China require the owner company to make user data accessible to the country’s ruling Communist party.Some lawmakers have advocated for a blanket ban of TikTok, which is headquartered in San Jose. But one of the other responses from Capitol Hill has been for Warner and the Republican South Dakota senator John Thune to draft and rally support for what is known as the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Act.Also known as the Restrict Act, the measure would authorize the Oval Office – through the commerce department – to review technologies which arrive from abroad. The commerce department could then move to ban those technologies or seek to force their sale, depending on any review’s findings.As with all such bills, the proposal would need approval from both congressional chambers as well as the president’s signature to become law. Democrats and the independents who caucus with them have a 51-49 advantage in the Senate where the Restrict Act has drawn support from both sides of the political aisle. Republicans hold a slight numerical edge in the House of Representatives.Warner’s remarks on Sunday came three days after TikTok’s chief executive officer, Shou Zi Chew, spent five hours publicly answering questions from members of the US House. As he testified, Chew defended TikTok’s relationship with China, saying the country’s rulers had never asked for user information and that the platform wouldn’t comply with such a request.“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said during the occasionally testy session, at which he also tried to assuage concerns about how the platform affects the mental health of its youngest users.Warner on Sunday said he was not impressed with Chew’s performance in front of lawmakers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“While I appreciated Mr Chew’s testimony, he just couldn’t answer the basic questions,” Warner said. “At the end of the day, TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, … and by Chinese law, that company has to be willing to turn over data.”Appearing separately on CNN’s State of the Union, Washington congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers – who is chairperson of the House’s energy and commerce committee – argued that TikTok could not be trusted despite Chew’s testimony. The Republican congresswoman called TikTok an “immediate threat” and said it deserved to get banned in the US.Though not directly related to TikTok, US fears about Chinese government surveillance reached a fever pitch after American fighter jets shot down a China-owned spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina on 4 February. The US was later reportedly investigating whether strong winds had blown the balloon off course after it took off from China’s Hainan Island and ultimately entered US airspace. More

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      in US Politics

      Utah bans under-18s from using social media unless parents consent

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      The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, has signed sweeping social media legislation requiring explicit parental permissions for anyone under 18 to use platforms such as TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. He also signed a bill prohibiting social media companies from employing techniques that could cause minors to develop an “addiction” to the platforms.The former is the first state law in the US prohibiting social media services from allowing access to minors without parental consent. The state’s Republican-controlled legislature passed both bills earlier this month, despite opposition from civil liberties groups.“We’re no longer willing to let social media companies continue to harm the mental health of our youth,” Cox, a Republican, said in a message on Twitter.The impact of social media on children has become a topic of growing debate among lawmakers at the state and federal levels. On the same day Cox signed the bills in Utah, TikTok’s CEO testified before Congress to address concerns about national security, data privacy and teen users’ mental health.The new law prohibiting minors from accessing social media without their parents’ consent would also allow parents or guardians to access all of their children’s posts. The platforms will be required to block users younger than 18 from accessing accounts between 10.30pm and 6.30am unless parents modify the settings.The laws also prohibit social media companies from advertising to minors, collecting information about them or targeting content to them.What’s not clear from the Utah laws and others is how the states plan to enforce the new regulations. Companies are already prohibited from collecting data on children younger than 13 without parental consent under the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. For this reason, social media companies already ban kids under 13 from signing up to their platforms – but children can easily get around it, both with and without their parents’ permission.Civil liberties groups have raised concerns that such provisions will block marginalized youth including LGBTQ+ teens from accessing online support networks and information.Tech groups have also opposed the laws. “Utah will soon require online services to collect sensitive information about teens and families, not only to verify ages, but to verify parental relationships, like government-issued IDs and birth certificates, putting their private data at risk of breach,” said Nicole Saad Bembridge, an associate director at NetChoice, a tech lobby group. “These laws also infringe on Utahans’ first amendment rights to share and access speech online – an effort already rejected by the supreme court in 1997.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe law will take effect next March. Michael McKell, the Republican state senator who sponsored the bill, told the New York Times that social media is “a contributing factor” to poor teen mental health, and that the laws were intended to address that issue.Several states have sought to enact guardrails for young social media users. Lawmakers in Connecticut and Ohio have put forward measures to require parental permissions for users younger than 16. Lawmakers in Arkansas and Texas have also introduced bills to restrict social media use among minors under 18, with the latter aiming to ban social media accounts for minors entirely.California enacted a measure requiring social media networks to enact the highest privacy settings for users younger than 18 as a default. More

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      in US Politics

      Key takeaways from TikTok hearing in Congress – and the uncertain road ahead

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      The first appearance in Congress for TikTok’s CEO Shou Zi Chew stretched more than five hours, with contentious questioning targeting the app’s relationship with China and protections for its youngest users.Chew’s appearance comes at a pivotal time for TikTok, which is facing bipartisan fire after experiencing a meteoric rise in popularity in recent years. The company is owned by Chinese firm ByteDance, raising concerns about China’s influence over the app – criticisms Chew repeatedly tried to resist throughout the hearing.“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” he said in prepared testimony.He defended TikTok’s privacy practices, stating they are are in line with those of other social media platforms, adding that in many cases the app collects less data than its peers. “There are more than 150 million Americans who love our platform, and we know we have a responsibility to protect them,” Chew said.Here are some of the other key criticisms Chew faced at Thursday’s landmark hearing, and what could lie ahead.TikTok’s relationship to China under fireMany members of the committee focused on ByteDance and its executives, who lawmakers say have ties to the Chinese Communist party.The committee members asked how frequently Chew was in contact with them, and questioned whether the company’s proposed solution, called Project Texas, would offer sufficient protection against Chinese laws that require companies to make user data accessible to the government.At one point, Tony Cárdenas, a Democrat from California, asked Chew outright if TikTok is a Chinese company. Chew responded that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.Neal Dunn, a Republican from Florida, asked with similar bluntness whether ByteDance has “spied on American citizens” – a question that came amid reports the company accessed journalists’ information in an attempt to identify which employees were leaking information. Chew responded that “spying is not the right way to describe it”.Concerns about the viability of ‘Project Texas’In an effort to deflect concerns about Chinese influence, TikTok has pledged to relocate all US user data to domestic servers through an effort titled Project Texas, a plan that would also allow US tech firm Oracle to scrutinize TikTok’s source code and act as a third-party monitor.The company has promised to complete the effort by the end of the year, but some lawmakers questioned whether that is possible, with hundreds of millions of lines of source code requiring review in a relatively short amount of time.“I am concerned that what you’re proposing with Project Texas just doesn’t have the technical capability of providing us the assurances that we need,” the California Republican Jay Obernolte, a congressman and software engineer, said.Youth safety and mental health in the spotlightAnother frequent focus was the safety of TikTok’s young users, considering the app has exploded in popularity with this age group in recent years. A majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people aged 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLawmakers cited reports that drug-related content has spread on the app, allowing teens to purchase dangerous substances easily online. Chew said such content violates TikTok policy and that they are removed when identified.“We take this very seriously,” Chew said. “This is an industry-wide challenge, and we’re investing as much as we can. We don’t think it represents the majority of the users’ experience on TikTok, but it does happen.”Others cited self-harm and eating disorder content, which have been spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app. Mental health concerns were underscored at the hearing by the appearance of Dean and Michelle Nasca, the parents of a teen who died by suicide after allegedly being served unsolicited self-harm content on TikTok.“We need you to do your part,” said congresswoman Kim Schrier, who is a pediatrician. “It could save this generation.”Uncertainty lingers over a possible banThe federal government has already barred TikTok on government devices, and the Biden administration has threatened a national ban. Thursday’s hearing left the future of the app in the US uncertain, as members of the committee appeared unwavering in their conviction that TikTok was a tool that could be exploited by the Chinese Communist party. Their conviction was bolstered by a report in the Wall Street Journal, released just hours before the hearing, indicating the Chinese government would not approve a sale of TikTok.Lawmakers outside of the committee are also unconvinced. US senators Mark Warner and John Thune said in a statement that all Chinese companies “are ultimately required to do the bidding of Chinese intelligence services, should they be called upon to do so” and that nothing Chew said in his testimony assuaged those concerns. Colorado senator Michael Bennet also reiterated calls for an all-out ban of TikTok.But the idea of a national ban still faces huge hurdles, both legally and in the court of public opinion. For one, previous attempts to ban TikTok under the Trump administration was blocked in court due in part to free speech concerns. TikTok also remains one of the fastest growing and most popular apps in the US and millions of its users are unlikely to want to give it up.A coalition of civil liberties, privacy and security groups including Fight for the Future, the Center for Democracy and Technology, and the American Civil Liberties Union have written a letter opposing a ban, arguing that it would violate constitutional rights to freedom of expression. “A nationwide ban on TikTok would have serious ramifications for free expression in the digital sphere, infringing on Americans’ first amendment rights and setting a potent and worrying precedent in a time of increased censorship of internet users around the world,” the letter reads.Where the coalition and many members of the House committee agree is on the pressing need for federal data privacy regulation that protects consumer information and reins in all big tech platforms, including TikTok. The American Data Privacy Act – a bipartisan bill working its way through Washington – is one effort under way to address those concerns. More