That TikTok hearing was pretty messed up, right?

Yesterday continued Congress’s current historical past of calling tech executives right into a listening to to berate them about their extreme assortment of customers’ non-public knowledge for monetary means. However the place Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai suffered via the hearings solely to face little to no repercussions for his or her probably egregious assortment of information and anti-competitive practices, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew was met with one thing way more outlined — and the customers of his platform instantly picked up on it.

“Your platform needs to be banned,” was one of many first issues Chew heard when the listening to began. That was from Chair Cathy McMorris-Rodgers (R-WA) in her opening assertion. Her thoughts appeared made up, as did most of the members of Congress on the Home Vitality and Commerce Committee, and for the subsequent few hours, Chew was berated by the committee members for every thing from TikTok challenges to NyQuil hen.

The members appeared notably curious about TikTok’s relationship with China. And that is smart. China is an authoritarian capitalist state the place the federal government will fortunately exert affect to construct revenue however the place it additionally has undue affect over the businesses that base their operations there. As a result of TikTok’s father or mother firm, ByteDance, relies in China, there’s potential for China to realize entry to knowledge managed by TikTok that it may not have the ability to for firms based mostly in different nations, resembling Meta and Google.

China’s attain on this regard is broad, and its skill to exert affect is highly effective. When Canada arrested the CFO and daughter of Huawei’s founder in 2018, China retaliated by arresting two Canadians and retrying and sentencing a 3rd to loss of life. “Due to the character of the political system in China, you’re naturally related to the federal government, and the federal government might put numerous stress on any agency in China to show in knowledge and to spy on different nations,” Lynette Ong, an affiliate professor of political science on the College of Toronto, advised me on the time.

China’s additionally retaliated towards its personal residents. When Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, spoke out towards deliberate tech regulation, he appeared to vanish in a similar way to the well-known actress Fan Bingbing (her crime was failing to pay sufficient taxes).

However China’s skill to exert horrible affect on its firms and residents and the way that may make TikTok vulnerable to undue affect wasn’t the road of questioning Congress appeared curious about pursuing. The few occasions it did come up, the questioning Congress member would typically proceed their rant, by no means giving Chew time to reply. Congress spent numerous time asking him about affiliations with the Chinese language Communist Occasion — China’s sole ruling political celebration. Incessantly, they might seek advice from the celebration, usually known as the CCP, as “communists,” calling again to the times of McCarthyism.

Between their obsession with communism, their typically obnoxious and condescending tone, and the occasional assumption that Chew was Chinese language, regardless of his repeated reminders that he’s Singaporean, the listening to was a bizarre, brutal, xenophobic mess. And customers on TikTok took discover.

They weren’t followers. The app has been flooded with movies (which TikTok itself might very effectively be boosting) of customers mocking Congress, supporting Chew and TikTok, and mentioning the flagrant hypocrisy of Congress’s determination to focus on TikTok whereas ignoring the equally egregious abuse of information and algorithms by its American opponents. TikTok may drive harmful challenges embraced by teenagers, however I don’t assume it’s incited a genocide as Meta has.

That is type of the issue with partaking in a xenophobic and deeply hypocritical marketing campaign towards a single, wildly standard app. Its very engaged customers will discover you’re being an asshole! And whereas Chew actually didn’t do himself or TikTok numerous favors yesterday or within the years since Trump first known as for a ban, Congress was in uncommon kind.

The thought of a Congressional listening to is you get folks mad and in your facet so you could have the political capital to push via no matter payments you’ve written on the matter. However typically you simply appear like a dumbass, and Congress appeared thunderingly out of contact yesterday. No matter political capital they’d hoped to realize was misplaced on the customers of TikTok. Representatives lectured Chew and TikTok customers over the hazard of the app, however wrapping it up in bizarre xenophobic rhetoric and tech illiteracy simply made them look pathetic to the viewers they had been making an attempt to achieve.

If the plan was to get folks to rethink utilizing TikTok as the USA jockeys for a worldwide management with China, I don’t assume it succeeded. Not if all our FYP feeds are something to go by.