Yesterday continued Congress’s latest historical past of calling tech executives right into a listening to to berate them about their extreme assortment of customers’ personal knowledge for monetary means. However the place Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai suffered by the hearings solely to face little to no repercussions for his or her doubtlessly egregious assortment of knowledge 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 lots of the members of Congress on the Home Vitality and Commerce Committee, and for the following few hours, Chew was berated by the committee members for every little thing from TikTok challenges to NyQuil rooster.

The members appeared significantly inquisitive about TikTok’s relationship with China. And that is sensible. 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 guardian firm, ByteDance, relies in China, there’s potential for China to achieve entry to knowledge managed by TikTok that it won’t be capable of for corporations primarily based in different international locations, similar to Meta and Google.

China’s attain on this regard is extensive, and its capability 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 demise. “Due to the character of the political system in China, you might be naturally related to the federal government, and the federal government may put lots of stress on any agency in China to show in knowledge and to spy on different international locations,” Lynette Ong, an affiliate professor of political science on the College of Toronto, informed me on the time.

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

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

Between their obsession with communism, their usually 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 may very properly be boosting) of customers mocking Congress, supporting Chew and TikTok, and stating the flagrant hypocrisy of Congress’s choice to focus on TikTok whereas ignoring the equally egregious abuse of knowledge and algorithms by its American rivals. TikTok would possibly drive harmful challenges embraced by teenagers, however I don’t suppose it’s incited a genocide as Meta has.

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

The concept of a Congressional listening to is you get individuals mad and in your aspect so you will have the political capital to push by no matter payments you’ve written on the matter. However generally you simply appear like a dumbass, and Congress appeared thunderingly out of contact yesterday. No matter political capital they’d hoped to achieve 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 attempting to succeed in.

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