Civics: White House Uses TikTok Sibling Company App on Same Day as Congressional Hearing

Chuck Ross:

As TikTok’s CEO faced withering scrutiny on Capitol Hill over the company’s links to China, the Biden White House shared a social media post made using technology from the Chinese spyware app’s sister company.

The White House used CapCut, a popular app owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, to make a video reel posted to Instagram, a Washington Free Beacon analysis of the post found. While CapCut has received far less scrutiny than TikTok, its links to ByteDance have caused concern that China could scoop up data on users of the app. A technology think tank funded by a former Google CEO says CapCut poses national security “challenges,” particularly “with respect to data harvesting, data exploitation, and—possibly—covert influence.”