As a result from TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s brutal five-hour congressional hearing on Thursday, TikToker and disinformation investigator abbie richards summed up what so many creators were thinking: “It’s actually remarkable how much less Congress knows about social media than the average person,” Richards told TechCrunch.
Via TikTok, users mocked congressmen for misunderstood how the technology works In one case, Rep. Richard Hudson (R-NC) asked Chew if TikTok connects to a user’s home Wi-Fi network. Chew replied, puzzled: “Only if the user turns on Wi-Fi.”
The ignorant questions were not unique to Chew’s interrogation by the government. At a high-profile hearing in 2018, the late Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) infamously asked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg how Facebook makes money if the app is free. Zuckerberg responded: “Senator, we post ads”, unable to suppress a smile. During a technical hearing two years ago, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) created another notorious viral moment by asking Facebook’s global head of security if he would “commit to ending finsta.”
As entertaining as these lapses in basic knowledge are, TikTok’s creators have serious concerns about the future of an app that has given them a community and, in some cases, a career.
TikTok creator Vitus “V” Spehar, known as News under the deskHe has amassed 2.9 million followers by sharing global news in an accessible way. But in this week’s news cycle, they’re front and center (literally, they sat just behind the CEO of TikTok as testified).
“I think it’s really concerning that a government is considering removing US citizens from the global conversation on an app as robust as TikTok,” Spehar told TechCrunch. “It’s not just about banning the app in the United States, it means disconnecting American citizens from Canada, the UK, Mexico, Iran, Ukraine and all the frontline reports they see from those countries, it just shows up on our [For You Page].”
Spehar is part of a group of TikTok creators who traveled to Washington, DC this week to advocate on behalf of TikTok and against the looming threat of a national ban. They participated in a press conference Wednesday afternoon hosted by Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a rare dissenting voice in Congress who raised questions about what he described as the “hysteria and panic” that surrounds TikTok.
Vitus Spehar, host of the TikTok channel Under The News Desk, presents a live broadcast during a press conference in front of the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, on Wednesday, March 22, 2023. (Nathan Howard/Bloomberg)
“Congress made it clear that they don’t understand TikTok, they don’t listen to their constituents who are in the TikToker community, and they are using this TikTok hysteria as a way to pass legislation that gives them superpowers to ban any app they consider. ‘unsafe’ in the future,” Spehar said after the hearing.
Tech ethicists and creators alike share this frustration. Dr. Casey Fiesler, a professor of technology ethics and policy at the University of Colorado Boulder, believes that national security concerns about the app are overblown.
“The risk appears to be entirely speculative at this point, and to me, I’m not sure how it’s substantially worse than all the worrying things about social media right now that the government hasn’t focused on,” Fiesler said. He has an audience of more than 100,000 followers on TikTok, where he explores topics like the nuances of content moderation and other topics that may arise in their postgraduate courses.
“I don’t think there’s a way to frame this as a general data privacy issue without going after every other tech company,” fiesler he told TechCrunch. “The only thing that makes sense is that it’s literally just about the fact that the company is based in China.”
There is still no evidence that TikTok has shared data with the Chinese government. But reports have shown that employees of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of TikTok, have seen the data of American users. A investigation Last year it revealed that engineers in China had open access to TikTok’s data on US users, undermining the company’s claims to the contrary. Other report, corroborated by ByteDance, discovered that a small group of engineers inappropriately accessed the TikTok data of two American journalists. They planned to use the location information to determine if the reporters had come across any ByteDance employees who may have leaked information to the press.
Still, TikTokers point to the distinction between sharing data with a private Chinese company and the Chinese government. For its part, TikTok has tried to appease US officials with a plan called Project Texas, a $1.5 billion venture that will move American user data to Oracle servers. Project Texas would also create a company subsidiary called TikTok US Data Security Inc., which plans to oversee any national security-related aspects of TikTok.
Spehar said they favor solutions like the Texas Project over US government proposals like the RESTRICT Act, which would give the US new tools to restrict and potentially prohibit technology exports from foreign adversaries.
“I don’t think we should consider things like the RESTRICT Act, or any kind of broad legislation that gives the government the power to say, ‘We’ve decided something isn’t safe,'” they told TechCrunch.
Several congressmen asked Chew about how TikTok moderates dangerous trends like “the blackout challenge,” in which kids try to see how long they can hold their breath. Kids died from this behavior after it circulated on TikTok, but the game didn’t originate on the platform: as soon as 2008, the CDC warned parents that 82 children had died from a trend called “the choking game.” One congressman even referred to “NyQuil chicken” as a dangerous TikTok trend, even though there’s little evidence anyone ever ate chicken soaked in cough medicine and the trend originated years ago on 4chan.
“The moral panic over TikTok challenges is something I’ve widely debunked, and then these politicians parrot them who don’t understand what moral panic is,” Richards told TechCrunch. “Using misinformation that I have written so much about and tried to debunk, and seeing it used against TikTok was so infuriating.”
Richards acknowledges that TikTok’s best feature is also its worst: Anything can go viral. She believes that TikTok’s “bottom-up” information environment lends itself to misinformation, but that same dynamic also showcases good content that would never get exposed on a different social network.
Richards is also a vocal critic of TikTok’s content moderation policies, which, like any other social network, are not always applied uniformly. During Thursday’s hearing, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) dramatically flashed a month-old TikTok video showing a gun along with text threatening the head of the House Committee that orchestrated Chew’s testimony. It’s an obvious violation of TikTok’s content guidelines, but Richards points out that he had very little input.
“In the context of TikTok, something that has 40 likes is effective moderation,” Richards said. “That means the video doesn’t reach a lot of people.” She believes that a video like the one the Florida lawmaker highlighted shouldn’t be on the platform, but ultimately, if it doesn’t reach many users, the potential for harm is limited.
Other creators expressed frustration that members of Congress failed to consider how TikTok has helped Americans, like LGBTQ+ people who found a community on the app or small business owners who were able to grow beyond their wildest dreams after going viral.
trans latina creator Noemi Hearts, who has 1 million followers on TikTok, was invited by TikTok to endorse the app in DC (TikTok compensated this group of creators, which included Spehar, by covering accommodation and travel costs). He said that he met other TikTokers on the trip who used the app to gain traction for their small businesses.
She also found an audience on TikTok that she couldn’t build anywhere else, after struggling to get a following on Instagram. But on TikTok, even small accounts have the potential to go viral, a phenomenon that can boost a career when things work out.
“The normal person’s message…for example, me, who was just a plus-size trans woman who grew up in South Central Los Angeles and had a dream: My message wasn’t there,” Naomi Hearts said, referring to Instagram .
Spehar also emphasized the role TikTok plays in helping people connect beyond the confines of their everyday environment.
“You can find communities that you can’t find where you live,” Spehar said. “I think of the kids in northwest Arkansas and in Tennessee – TikTok is literally one of the reasons they don’t take their own lives, because they know they’re not alone.”
Although Richards mainly writes about misinformation on TikTok, he laments the positive aspects of the app that could be lost if it is banned in the US.
“Banning TikTok would ultimately hurt marginalized communities the most, who are underrepresented by institutional news and organizations,” Richards said. “And if all of a sudden all that infrastructure goes away, suddenly they’re going to be in the dark.”
