It’s not the year’s most high-profile legislation, but a bill called the Kids Online Safety Act is currently pending on Capitol Hill. As a New York Times report explained, the measure intends to impose new requirements on online services to “take ‘reasonable measures’ to prevent harm — including online bullying, harassment, sexual exploitation, anorexia, self-harm and predatory marketing — to minors who use their platforms.”
With this in mind, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a rather contentious hearing yesterday with executives from a variety of tech giants, including Meta (formerly facebook), X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok, and it’s probably safe to say the executives did not enjoy the discussion.
At one point, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina went so far as to say the companies had “blood on your hands.” (He was referring to social media platforms, not the firearm industry.)
But as The New Republic noted, it was a different GOP member of the panel who pursued an especially unfortunate line of questioning.
Republican Senator Tom Cotton grilled the CEO of TikTok [Shou Zi Chew] on Wednesday with a series of increasingly racist questions about the tech executive’s ties to the Chinese government. ... At one point, Cotton repeatedly demanded if Chew had been a member of or affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party. Chew, clearly growing increasingly frustrated, replied every time that he is Singaporean.
At the height of the U.S. red scare, Republican Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin became infamous for a signature question he and his allies would use to browbeat committee witnesses: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Decades later, politicians who embrace McCarthyism tend to prefer at least some subtlety, but at this hearing, Cotton didn’t bother with the pretense, asking the TikTok CEO questions that echoed McCarthy’s infamous line nearly word for word — prompting Shou Zi Chew to explain that he’s from Singapore, not China.
Soon after, Cotton sat down with Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, who reminded the senator that Singapore is a democracy that’s been self-governed since 1959. “Do you have some kind of information on this TikTok CEO that we should be aware of?” the host asked.
The Republican largely dodged the question, eventually saying that a person “can be affiliated with or associated with the Chinese Communist Party anywhere in the world.”
Or put another way, Cotton didn’t have any evidence to suggest the TikTok CEO has ties to the Chinese Communist Party, but he thought it’d be responsible to pose the questions during a Senate hearing anyway.
Is it true that TikTok is headquartered in China? Yes. Does that excuse the Arkansan's line of questioning? No.