Alas

In his written testimony, which was posted by the committee one day ahead of the hearing, Shou Zi Chew made the case that separating TikTok from ByteDance wouldn’t solve the privacy and security concerns expressed about the app that the company is addressing with Project Texas, its plan to shift all U.S. user data to the Oracle computing cloud, among other things. Alas, that entirely missed the point. No matter what Chew said—or could have said— the only thing that Congress wanted to hear was that ByteDance was going to sell TikTok to an American buyer. And he didn’t say that. Indeed, China said this past week that it opposes a forced sale.