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TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance had its biggest lobbying quarter ever, spending more than $2.1 million in the second quarter lobbying the US government, according to a report. disclosure filed Wednesday in the federal database.
That represents a 130% increase over ByteDance’s Q1 lobbying spending and marks the first time it has hit $2 million in a quarter since first registering its lobbying disclosures. in 2019. The company spent about $4.7 million on lobbying for the whole of 2021, according to the disclosure.
The company has been lobbying on many issues. Part of the law it discussed was America’s Online Choice and Innovation Act, a key antitrust bill that would ban dominant technology platforms from prioritizing their own services over those of rivals that rely on their services. It also moved two versions of a major funding bill aimed at enhancing America’s competitiveness against Chinaseveral online privacy bills, defense spending bills, and a bill to ban TikTok from Department of Homeland Security devices.
ByteDance engaged with both houses of Congress during the quarter as well as executive agencies including the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State and the Executive Office of the President, according to the filing.
The lobbying revelations do not state exactly what ByteDance is promoting, and neither ByteDance nor TikTok immediately responded to CNBC’s request for comment.
TikTok’s ownership by a Chinese company has complicated its relationship with Washington as many lawmakers are skeptical about how secure it can hold US user data while believing the government China may force ByteDance to provide information.
TikTok says it does not store US user data in China and will not hand it over to the government. But the skepticism of the legislators persisted and was recently rekindled by a BuzzFeed News Report shows that China-based ByteDance employees have access to non-public US user data. A TikTok spokesperson told BuzzFeed at the time that it is constantly working to validate its security standards, including passing independent third-party tests.
Just before that article was published last month, TikTok released a blog post announce it through a partnership with Oracleit “changed the default storage location of US user data” so that “100% of US user traffic is being routed to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”
“We still use US and Singapore data centers for backups, but as we continue our work, we plan to remove US users’ private data from the centers. our data and move it all over to Oracle’s cloud servers located in the United States,” the company added.
