How TikTok and its parent company spent over $13 million on struggling lobbying campaign

Warner met earlier this year with TikTok lobbyists, according to a person at the gathering at the senator’s office. The Virginia lawmaker and Thune later introduced their bill that would empower the Commerce secretary to take action against TikTok. The White House has since endorsed the bill and called for Congress to pass it so President Joe Biden can sign it.

Warner’s office did not return a request for comment.

TikTok appears to have ramped up its lobbying just ahead of Chew’s testimony in front of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The company flew TikTok influencers to Washington before the event.

The company also had allies in a handful of Democratic lawmakers such as Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. A day before the hearing, he and popular content creators on the app held a news conference to oppose a potential ban.

But in private meetings, some of those same influencers told Bowman that there need to be regulations passed to protect their data across all social media platforms, including TikTok, while keeping the app intact, according to an aide familiar with the discussions.

Regardless of their impact on lawmakers, creators’ pleas to maintain access to TikTok in the U.S. have seemed to resonate with many American users who see the app as a source of entertainment, information and even income. During and after the hearing, TikTok users shared clips of lawmakers asking basic questions of the CEO, deriding Congress for what they saw as a lack of understanding of the technology.

But based on the five hours of tense questioning by members of both parties at the hearing, the creators’ appeals didn’t seem to offset the deep concerns lawmakers shared about the app’s connections to China, along with the addictive and potentially harmful qualities of its design.

“I don’t think they won over any lawmakers,” Alex Moore, communications director for Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said of TikTok’s pre-hearing lobbying. Bringing in TikTok creators to amplify the company’s message “hasn’t swayed my boss,” Moore added.

Still, Moore said his office has been hearing a lot from constituents since the hearing. Before the testimony, calls about TikTok would “trickle in,” he said. But after, “our phones were ringing off the hook,” with the majority of callers voicing opposition to a TikTok ban.

“We heard overwhelmingly that’s not what our constituents are interested in,” he said.

While often a call like that “starts out hot,” Moore said constituents would tend to calm down once staff explained that Schakowsky wants comprehensive privacy legislation so as not to “let other companies off the hook” for similar data practices.

Schakowsky told CNBC immediately after the hearing that there will still likely be “further discussion” about how to address the concerns directly related to TikTok’s Chinese ownership. But Schakowsky, who co-sponsored the bipartisan privacy legislation that passed out of the committee last Congress, said she hopes the hearing brings renewed momentum to privacy protections that would apply to other large tech companies as well.

Article source: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/31/tiktok-bytedance-spent-millions-on-lobbying-congress.html