Excerpt:

>TikTok is grappling with an increasingly real prospect of being banned in the United States. This wouldn’t just be a mostly performative prohibition of installing the app on federal or state government-owned devices.

>The ban TikTok is now facing would forbid its China-based parent company, ByteDance, from doing business in the United States, which would block Apple and Google from hosting the TikTok app in their app stores.

>It wouldn’t make it illegal for you, the consumer, to use TikTok. It would just make it much harder to do so.

>ByteDance is spending a lot of money trying to convince detractors that it doesn’t take marching orders from China and that it wouldn’t give the Chinese government US user data or influence US users.

> 

>The company has spent millions building up and expanding its Washington, DC, presence, and more than $1 billion on “Project Texas,” an effort to rebuild the app on US servers in order to wall it off from ByteDance and China as much as possible, while also promising several layers of independent oversight and transparency.

>Accordingly, TikTok is getting more aggressive about making Project Texas’s case to politicians, public interest groups, academics, and the media after years of lying low and quietly trying to work out a deal that CFIUS [Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] still has yet to officially agree to.

>The company briefed think tanks in late January, while TikTok’s lobbyists have also “swarmed” lawmakers’ offices, and the company is currently hiring several people for communications and policy positions on a state and federal level, according to the New York Times.

>The only thing that may have grown faster than TikTok’s popularity in the US is the company’s DC presence.

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>ByteDance spent just $270,000 on federal lobbyists in 2019, a year when TikTok agreed to a settlement with the FTC over children’s privacy law violations for a then-record fine of $5.7 million and when lawmakers started to raise concerns over its ties to China.

>ByteDance and TikTok spent $2.61 million on federal lobbyists in 2020, hiring people with connections to Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike (some were former lawmakers themselves).

>That spending nearly doubled to $5.18 million in 2021, and grew again to about $5.5 million in 2022, according to publicly available data. In late 2021, TikTok signed a lease for its first DC office. In April 2022, it grabbed an additional floor.

>That October, it hired Jamal Brown, who was the press secretary for Biden’s presidential campaign and then the deputy press secretary for the Pentagon, as a policy communications director.

>While ByteDance has spent a lot on federal lobbying, some of its peers — Meta and Amazon, for instance — still spend a lot more. Meta, for instance, spent over $19.15 million on lobbying in 2022, and Amazon spent $21.38 million.

Sara Morrison, 26 Jan. 2023, Vox.com (Vox Media)