President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign is reportedly planning to stay on TikTok, the social media app whose parent company ByteDance is controlled by the Chinese communist government, even after the president signed a bill into law this week that forces the app to be sold from the company or face an outright ban in the U.S.
“A fragmented media environment requires us to show up and meet voters where they are — and that includes online,” a Biden campaign official said in justifying their decision to stay on the platform. “TikTok is one of many places we’re making sure our content is being seen by voters.”
“When the stakes are this high in the election, we are going to use every tool we have to reach young voters where they are,” the campaign official said, claiming that the campaign will use “enhanced security measures” on the app.
The statement comes after Biden signed a bill into law on Wednesday that forces TikTok to divest from ByteDance in the next 270 days.
TikTok CEO Shou Chew vowed that the company would fight the new law and claimed in an emotional pitch to the app’s users that the law would “take TikTok away from you and 170 million Americans who find community in connection on our platform.”
“Make no mistake, this is a ban, a ban on TikTok, and a ban on you and your voice,” he continued. “Politicians may say otherwise, but don’t get confused.”
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“Rest assured, we aren’t going anywhere,” he added. “We are confident and we will keep fighting for your rights in the courts.”
Chew later claimed that the company has “built safeguards that no other peer company has made” and that it “invested billions of dollars to secure your data and keep our platform free from outside manipulation.”
His claims come after reports surfaced earlier this month of a former senior employee at the company who says that he was forced to send American user data to ByteDance in Beijing, contradicting the company’s contention that it operates independently from China.
FBI Director Christopher Wray recently testified to Congress: “This is a tool that is ultimately within the control of the Chinese government.”
Former ByteDance executive Yintao Yu made explosive allegations against the company in a federal lawsuit last year, saying that ByteDance’s offices in Beijing had a special unit of Chinese Communist Party members who “guided how the company advanced core Communist values.”
“The Committee maintained supreme access to all the company data, even data stored in the United States,” said Yu, who spent part of his time at the company in its Chinese offices. He said it did not matter where users were located because the company created a “backdoor” to access their information.
He said the company “systematically created fabricated users” to boost engagement numbers and witnessed engineers manually alter the algorithm to achieve the country’s geopolitical agenda. One example he cited was how engineers boosted content “that expressed hatred for Japan,” The New York Times reported.
“There was no debate,” he said. “They just did it.”
ABC News reported last year that cybersecurity experts discovered that for those who have downloaded the app but never used it, TikTok “still has your data even if you’ve never used TikTok.”
The report added, “And it’s collecting and transferring that data whether or not the app is deleted.”
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