U.S. lawmakers grill TikTok, but it’s all bark and no bite
My early years in this field were dominated by news of the Arab uprisings and the ways in which protest movements were being organized — but also surveilled — through technology. When Egyptian authorities shut down the internet amid mass demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, for many of us it seemed unprecedented.
But not for our colleagues from greater China, perhaps the world’s first mover on all things authoritarian tech. Years later, I worked on a story about how shutdowns were routine in China’s ethnic minority regions and could last for months at a time. Political riots in Lhasa triggered a shutdown that lasted from March until December of 2008. In 2009, protests in Xinjiang, home to a majority of China’s Uyghur Muslim population, led to a yearlong blackout. Chinese authorities were ahead of the curve on surveillance tech, too. In 2017, Xinjiang residents were made to install Jingwang, a surveillance software system as pervasive as products like Pegasus, but with added features like a remote control option that would allow the operator to manipulate the user’s phone.
Xinjiang and the systematic oppression of Uyghurs was the focus of one of the two major U.S. congressional hearings on China last week. But only one made major media headlines — and it wasn’t the hearing on what U.S. officials now refer to as the Uyghur genocide.
Instead, the congressional grilling of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew grabbed most of the attention. Members of Congress from both parties put on a spectacle of Cold War-style grandstanding, complete with the Sinophobic pigeonholing of Chew. Representatives repeatedly suggested that Chew was an associate of the Chinese Communist Party. And when Texas Republican Dan Crenshaw insisted that Chew himself was Chinese, the executive had to state for the record that he is from, and lives in, Singapore, an entirely separate country.