TikTok Cancels US Congressional Meeting Over Child Safety

TikTok has backed out of a meeting with the U.S. House Select Committee on China that’s meant to address national security concerns. The company cited “a desire to avoid broader scrutiny of its child safety practices,” according to a statement from committee chairman John Moolenaar on Wednesday. #Digital Wellness 📱🧘 The meeting, five months in the making, was scheduled to take place on September 15. TikTok’s chief security officer Will Farrell was set to appear before a bipartisan roundtable to address questions about China’s influence on TikTok’s algorithm and its access to Americans’ data. The company’s U.S. data security operations were spun out into an American-led joint venture in January as part of a national security deal, though ByteDance continues to control the commercial operations of TikTok. Moolenaar told Bloomberg in an interview that TikTok backed out of the House meeting on August 27, a day after Meta’s $18 billion settlement with U.S. states and territories over claims that Facebook and Instagram were designed to addict children. TikTok claimed it could not answer questions on child-safety issues, Moolenaar said in the interview, even though no part of the roundtable was to focus on them. TikTok didn’t respond to a request for comment. TikTok has continued to face scrutiny in the U.S. even after the landmark national security deal. In May, Senator Ed Markey pressed the U.S. joint venture for more details on the algorithm’s review and the company’s relationship with China, stating that the spin-off deal violated “the spirit, if not the letter” of a 2024 law enacted to prevent Chinese manipulation of TikTok’s content. https://finance.yahoo.com..