Members of Congress Don’t Dance on TikTok

Anupam Chander is Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Rebooting Social Media at Harvard University and Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University. Donara Aghajani is a second-year law student at Georgetown Law. Alyanna Apacible (Georgetown Law, LLM ’23) is a privacy and technology lawyer currently working at an international non-profit. Shutterstock If the mantra of campaign managers is to go where the people are, one might expect politicians to go to TikTok, which reports more than 150 million active users per month in the United States. But our study of Congress found that less than one out of every ten members of Congress has a TikTok account from which they post content. Only 34 Representatives and 7 Senators have an official TikTok account. The data we collected can be viewed here. Why are most members of Congress avoiding TikTok? Congressional reticence to use TikTok likely arises out of its ownership by a company headquartered in Beijing, China. Many American politicians have accused TikTok of being a pawn of the Chinese Communist Party, though they have not backed up these accusations with recent evidence. (In 2019, TikTok did acknowledge the suspension of an account that criticized the Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghur population, but TikTok claimed that the suspension was a mistake.) TikTok has admitted that certain data of TikTok users has been accessed by company employees from China (who were trying to track down how company information was released to reporters).  Given concerns that the app…Members of Congress Don’t Dance on TikTok