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

The Biden White House shared a social media post made using concept from the sister organization of the Chinese malware app as TikTok’s CEO faced intense attention on Capitol Hill over the business’ ties to China.

A Washington Free Beacon evaluation of the article revealed that the White House created a video reel for Instagram using the well-known CapCut app, which is owned by the parent company of TikTok. Although CapCut has received much less attention than TikTok, its connections to ByteDance have raised questions about whether China could collect information about game customers. CapCut reportedly poses national security” challenges ,” in particular” with regard to data harvesting, data exploitation, and— possibly— covert influence ,” according to a technology think tank funded by an ex-Google CEO.

The Affordable Care Act is referred to as” the law of the land” in the White House reel, which also features President Joe Biden strolling alongside Netflix partner Barack Obama. One source claims that a CapCut pattern that went viral this quarter was the base of the background music and special effects. The exact same template was recently used by Rep. Adam Schiff( D., Calif. ) in a TikTok post for his California Senate campaign.

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Concerns about ByteDance and its ties to the Chinese authorities have grown as a result of the White House game. According to American intelligence officials, the Chinese government, which owns stock of ByteDance, may spy on Americans using information gathered by the company and its subsidiaries or disseminate pro-Putan advertising on their public television feeds.

The CEO of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, didn’t do much to allay worries during his House witness on Thursday. Chew frequently evaded inquiries about TikTok’s willingness to give the Chinese government information upon request. Additionally, he refused to acknowledge that Uyghur Muslims in northern China have been subjected to human rights abuses by the Chinese authorities.

TikTok was lately prohibited from government-issued phones by the Biden administration. The administration has never outlawed CapCut from national devices, despite the fact that the most recent movie was most probable made on a public telephone.

Despite not being as well-known as TikTok, CapCut’s data storage measures may cause worries that Americans’ data will end up in the hands of the Chinese government. According to the Wall Street Journal, CapCut collects user-added photos and videos as well as information about their facilities, genders, and birthdays.

According to Jane Chung, the Big Tech transparency advocate for the consumer team Public Citizen,” We have problems about data privacy and security with TikTok, so I don’t fear an application from the same parent company may also arouse concerns from us.”

CapCut is one of the Chinese apps that” pose similar challenges” to American security as TikTok,” particularly with respect to data harvesting, data exploitation, and— possibly— covert influence ,” according to the Special Competitive Studies Project, a technology think tank funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

A request for comment was never answered by the White House.