CHINA WATCHChina-Owned Parent Company of TikTok Among Top Spenders on Internet Lobbying
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data.
ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of social media platform TikTok, has dramatically upped its U.S. lobbying effort since 2020 as U.S.-China relations continue to sour and is now the fourth-largest Internet company in spending on federal lobbying as of last year, according to newly released data.
Publicly available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington nonprofit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data, shows that ByteDance and its subsidiaries, including TikTok, the wildly popular short video app, have spent more than $13 million on U.S. lobbying since 2020. In 2022 alone, Fox News reported, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying.
Only Amazon.com ($19.7 million) and the parent companies of Google ($11 million) and Facebook ($19 million) spent more, according to OpenSecrets.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2 million on lobbying, according to Fox News.
The lobbyists hired by ByteDance include former U.S. senators Trent Lott and John Breaux; David Urban, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign who was also a former chief of staff for the late Senator Arlen Specter; Layth Elhassani, special assistant to President Barack Obama in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; and Samantha Clark, former deputy staff director of the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.
In November, TikTok hired Jamal Brown, a deputy press secretary at the Pentagon who was national press secretary for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, to manage policy communications for the Americas, with a focus on the U.S., according to Politico.
“This is kind of the template for how modern tech lobbying goes,” Dan Auble, a senior researcher at Open Secrets, told Vox. “These companies come on the scene and suddenly start spending substantial amounts of money. And ByteDance has certainly done that.”
U.S. officials have criticized TikTok as a security risk due to ties between ByteDance and the Chinese government. The worry is that user data collected by TikTok could be passed to Beijing, so lawmakers have been trying to regulate or even ban the app in the U.S.
In 2019, TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violating children’s privacy rights. The Trump administration attempted unsuccessfully to ban downloads of TikTok from app stores and outlaw transactions between Americans and ByteDance.
As of late December, TikTok has been banned on federally managed devices, and 19 states had at least partially blocked the app from state-managed devices.
