The Corner
‘Intelligence Matter’: TikTok Parent Company Blacklists China’s Opponents, State Department Reveals
Prior to this report, Biden’s State Department had not addressed the app’s ties to the Chinese government.
The State Department said that TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have blacklisted Beijing’s critics to prevent opposition to the Chinese government from spreading online.
The new accusation is contained in an expansive, 58-page official U.S.-government report that found that the Chinese Communist Party spends billions annually to promote its propaganda, disinformation, and censorship regime globally. ByteDance is a Beijing-based tech company with extensive ties to the Chinese government.
The newly released U.S.-government assessment comes as TikTok’s lobbyists in Washington are viewed as having successfully stalled Congress’s attempts to ban the app. Neither TikTok nor ByteDance responded to National Review’s multiple requests for comment.
“According to U.S. Government information, as of late 2020, ByteDance maintained a regularly updated internal list identifying people who were likely blocked or restricted from all ByteDance platforms, including TikTok, for reasons such as advocating for Uyghur independence,” states the document, which was issued yesterday by Foggy Bottom’s Global Engagement Center.
“ByteDance directed that specific individuals be added to this list if they were deemed to pose a public sentiment risk, likely to prevent criticism of the PRC government from spreading on ByteDance-owned platforms.” It added that the growing popularity of Chinese tech platforms globally gives Beijing an opportunity to censor criticism of its policies in Xinjiang, where the U.S. says the CCP is carrying out genocide.
A State Department spokesperson declined NR’s request to say more about the source of that information, calling it “an intelligence matter.”
Prior to this report, the State Department during the Biden administration had not addressed TikTok’s ties to the Chinese government, though other top U.S. officials have recently warned that those links pose a threat to national security.
“The State Department and its partners across the government have been clear in their concerns for technologies like TikTok,” the department spokesperson said, adding that State “stands in strong opposition” to the use of technology to stifle dissent and target authoritarian regimes’ critics.
TikTok’s suppression of content that criticizes the Chinese government has led in part to the calls by lawmakers to ban the app.
The company has previously taken down videos about, and blocked users who posted content relating to, the Uyghur genocide and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, among other topics. It briefly suspended Hong Konger journalist Kim Wong last year, after he made a video comparing Chinese protests against the draconian zero-Covid policy to the Tiananmen Square demonstrations.
TikTok has chalked incidents like that up to “technical error,” and other purported mistakes, rather than ByteDance directives to suppress criticism of Beijing.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew told Congress during a hearing this year that TikTok users are free to post content about China’s abuses in Xinjiang, and that there is plenty of content about those topics on the app. But pressed by lawmakers on the topic, Chew, a former ByteDance CFO, repeatedly declined to address the abuses.
Some of Chew’s colleagues have gone even further. ByteDance’s top lobbyist Michael Beckerman parroted Beijing’s talking points on Xinjiang during a meeting with congressional aides in 2020, NR previously reported.
While earlier this year members of Congress advanced legislation to ban, or otherwise restrict, TikTok, progress has stalled.
Senator Mark Warner said that TikTok’s lobbyists slowed the momentum of his RESTRICT Act. And while some of the fiercest criticism of TikTok has come from Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reported that Jeffrey Yass, an early investor in ByteDance, has donated tens of millions of dollars to GOP campaigns and the influential Club for Growth.
Meanwhile, although the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S., a Treasury Department–led regulatory body, reportedly ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok in March, the current status of the talks between the company and the government remains unknown.