Many of these PR people and lobbyists are former U.S. government officials, and their connection with a U.S. adversary may follow them for a long time.
TikTok is closing out 2022 with a particularly abysmal week. The firm’s top lobbyist, Michael Beckerman, flubbed a CNN interview, repeatedly dodging questions about the Uyghur genocide — on which TikTok parent ByteDance collaborated with the Chinese government to hide.
Just two days later, a ByteDance-led spy campaign targeting American journalists came to light. Although ByteDance and TikTok spun the revelations as the work of a few bad apples, reporting by Forbes shows that the spying was backed by company leadership. Worse, TikTok had previously claimed that it had never targeted journalists after Forbes reported that it planned to monitor the locations of U.S. TikTok users.
Then today, Congress passed a bill that would ban the app from all federal devices.
TikTok’s lobbying and PR teams, which comprise several former congressional staffers, a one-time Biden administration Pentagon spokesperson, and former GOP Senate majority leader Trent Lott, have taken some big hits. (You can find a full list of TikTok’s lobbyists here.) With this week’s spy-campaign news, they’ve revealed themselves as having repeatedly peddled disinformation about their company’s activities.
The main job for lobbyists and PR people is to maintain relationships with the press and congressional offices. This is possible even for a company as controversial as TikTok. But after TikTok was revealed to have lied so blatantly this week, what journalist or congressional office would agree to take a call from them?
When the dust settles, if Washington one day opts for a total ban of the app, TikTok’s reputation-laundering staff might have trouble finding work that doesn’t involve promoting Chinese military companies in Washington. (Yes, Chinese military companies also have active U.S. lobbying and PR operations.)
That these people — many of whom are former government employees — hitched their professional reputations to a company with such close ties to a foreign adversary of the U.S. is something that might follow them for a long time.