Black lawmakers, religious leaders march on Florida Capitol over AP course

WLRN 91.3 FM | By Ryan Dailey | News Service of Florida
Published February 15, 2023 

Andrew Nelles / AP
Rev. Al Sharpton delivers the eulogy for Tyre Nichols at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis, Tenn., on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023.

TALLAHASSEE — Florida's rejection of an African American studies course continued to draw criticism Wednesday, as Black lawmakers, religious leaders and civil-rights leader Al Sharpton led a march to the Capitol.

Sharpton, a longtime activist who heads the National Action Network, focused heavily on denouncing Gov. Ron DeSantis.

“If you would study history, governor, you would have known that to mess with us in education always ends to your defeat,” Sharpton said to a crowd gathered outside the Capitol.

Sharpton also called for a voter drive to oppose the governor, who was re-elected by a wide margin in November.

“You’re gonna tell the whole story. You are not going to give no part-time story to our story. Our children need to know the whole story, not to only know how bad you were, but to know how strong they are,” Sharpton said.

Hundreds of people marched several blocks from Bethel Missionary Baptist Church to the Capitol for a rally.

The march and rally came after the state Department of Education last month informed the College Board that an Advanced Placement African American Studies course would not be offered in Florida classrooms unless changes were made. Advanced Placement courses are college-level classes offered to high-school students.

The department cited several topics that were planned for inclusion in the course, including “Black queer studies” and “the reparations movement,” as reasons for the rejection.

The College Board on Feb. 1 released an updated course framework that essentially was scrubbed of topics and literary works that drew the education department’s concerns.

The Department of Education, however, has not accepted the revised course. Cassie Palelis, press secretary for the department, told The News Service of Florida in an email Wednesday that the College Board “still has not submitted their official framework to the department for review.”

Meanwhile, a feud between the College Board and the DeSantis administration has been intensifying. The College Board in a statement Saturday said the organization regrets “not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander,” while DeSantis on Monday accused the organization of putting “neo-Marxism into the proposed syllabus” of the course.

The governor this week also suggested that Florida could completely sever ties with the College Board, which develops Advanced Placement courses and creates the SAT test that evaluates prospective college students on reading, math, writing and language.

“Does it have to be done by the College Board, or can we utilize some of these other providers, who I think have a really, really strong track record? I don’t think anyone should be concerned about somehow our high school students not having an opportunity for that. They absolutely will. It’s just a matter of what is the best way to do it,” DeSantis said during an appearance in Jacksonville.

Democrats have objected to the suggestion of shifting away from the College Board’s services. House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell, D-Tampa, accused DeSantis of retaliating against the College Board after it pushed back against his administration.

“You see, that’s the rub with this guy (DeSantis) and I don’t want you to miss this — if you dare to speak out against him, he will come after you. That’s his M.O. He wants us to be intimidated and afraid. And we cannot be intimidated or afraid,” Driskell told the crowd during Wednesday’s rally.

Sharpton to DeSantis: Stop censoring Black history

By ANTHONY IZAGUIRRE

February 15, 2023

The Rev. Al Sharpton speaks to a crowd of hundreds from the steps of the Senate portico during the National Action Network demonstration in response to Gov. Ron DeSantis's rejection of a high school African American history course, Wednesday, Feb. 15, 2023 in Tallahassee, Fla. (Alicia Devine /Tallahassee Democrat via AP)


TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Rev. Al Sharpton led a march to the Florida Capitol on Wednesday to protest Gov. Ron DeSantis’ rejection of a high school African American history course, accusing the Republican of censoring a fundamental chapter of the nation’s past.

The civil rights leader walked through Tallahassee to the Statehouse with dozens of supporters who criticized the state’s blocking of the Advanced Placement pilot course.

“Our children need to know the whole story. Not to not only know how bad you were, but to know how strong they are,” Sharpton told the crowd, adding, “If you would study history, governor, you would have known to mess with us and education always ends in your defeat.”

Ahead of an expected White House run, DeSantis has continued to focus on eliminating what he calls “woke” ideology in education, seizing on national flashpoints around what children learn about race, gender identity and history.

Sharpton’s appearance in Tallahassee signaled an elevation of the national scrutiny that has followed DeSantis during his time as governor and that has increased as he stakes out his position as a firebrand willing to lean into cultural divides.

The dispute began last month when Florida announced it was rejecting the College Board’s course, saying it violated state law and was historically inaccurate.

The state argued that it promotes the idea that modern American society oppresses Black people, other minorities and women; includes a chapter on Black Queer Studies that the administration finds inappropriate; and uses articles by critics of capitalism.

The College Board released a revised curriculum downplaying some components that had drawn criticism, a move that drew the ire of scholars and advocates on the left. The organization has since maintained that the changes were substantially complete before DeSantis made his objections.

The spat continued when the board issued a set of statements days apart that heavily criticized the DeSantis administration and apologized for not taking a stronger stance. The board has also said it is still awaiting clarification on exactly how the course violates Florida law.

“We deeply regret not immediately denouncing the Florida Department of Education’s slander, magnified by the DeSantis administration’s subsequent comments, that African American Studies ‘lacks educational value.’ Our failure to raise our voice betrayed Black scholars everywhere and those who have long toiled to build this remarkable field,” the board said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Education said Wednesday that the College Board had not yet submitted the official course framework for additional review.

DeSantis has begun suggesting this week that the state break away from the College Board and its Advanced Placement courses and instead contract with other educational organizations that maintain programs for high schoolers to gain college credit.

“Florida students are going to have that ability that is not going to be diminished, in fact we’re going to continue to work to expand it,” DeSantis said, “but it’s not clear to me that this particular operator is the one that’s going to need to be used in the future.”

The rejection of the course has drawn national attention and led Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to announce that his state would expand the pilot course from one school to 26.

Like other Republicans and potential presidential candidates, DeSantis has taken an aggressive stance on education policy and moved to increase government control over what is taught in the classroom.

Over the last year, he has signed a law critics call “ Don’t Say Gay,” which bars lessons on sexual orientation or gender identity through the third grade as well as instruction deemed inappropriate, and also has approved what is known as the Stop WOKE Act, to restrict certain race-based conversations and analysis in schools and businesses.

More recently the governor announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity and inclusion, and critical race theory.

He has also moved to reshape the once progressive New College of Florida, appointing six new trustees who are tasked with transforming it into a classical liberal arts school modeled after conservative favorite Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Florida is weeks away from its regular legislative session, in which a Republican supermajority stands ready to deliver on the governor’s conservative agenda. DeSantis is expected to use the session to stack up political victories that will form the platform for his potential 2024 presidential bid.

Opinion
Ron DeSantis’s latest culture-war target: Media libel laws


By Erik Wemple

Media critic |Washington Post

When Donald Trump pledged in 2016 to “open up” libel laws, critics guffawed, noting that a U.S. president lacked the authority to tinker with Supreme Court doctrine.

Now Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a potential GOP presidential candidate, appears to have his own approach to tearing down barriers protecting news organizations from defamation suits. “Stay tuned,” DeSantis said at an event last week in which he guided a panel discussion on media regulation. During an hour of discussion, DeSantis, an ace practitioner of GOP media-bashing rhetoric, showed why some critics view him as a more dangerous embodiment of Trump’s two-bit authoritarianism. He’s smarter, more informed and more disciplined.

Though no less wrong.

For a politician who abhors the mainstream media, DeSantis sure seems to adore its trappings. His panel discussion took place before a studio audience on a sleek set with a graphic of a spinning globe in the background, overlaid by a banner: “TRUTH.” There was general agreement among the panelists — who included defamation attorney Libby Locke, former Covington (Ky.) Catholic student Nicholas Sandmann and Claremont Institute fellow Carson Holloway — that U.S. news media organizations need a more restrictive legal regime.

“When you’re knowingly putting out false information and, indeed, I’d say these companies are probably the leading purveyors of disinformation in our entire society right now,” said DeSantis, a Harvard Law graduate, “there needs to be an ability for people to defend themselves, not through government regulation or restriction but through being able to seek private right of action.”

Boldface added to highlight the irony of a Republican — whose party has long been committed to limiting the private right of action — extolling the private right of action, essentially a fancy term for people filing lawsuits to enforce their rights.

The roundtable veered quickly into a beatdown of New York Times v. Sullivan, the landmark 1964 Supreme Court decision requiring that public officials (later extended to “public figures”) seeking damages for defamation must prove “actual malice” — that an outlet knowingly published a falsehood or proceeded with reckless disregard for truth. Holloway said that in a “properly functioning democratic culture,” the media should provide “truthful and accurate information, not defamatory smears of public figures.”

Locke, whose firm Clare Locke LLP has brought several prominent defamation cases, including a jury verdict in favor of a University of Virginia dean against Rolling Stone magazine, claimed that in every step of the process, “the thumb is on the scale in favor of the press.” The courts, she lamented, have determined that “limited-purpose public figures” — people who become embroiled in controversies and a “huge swath of the American citizenry,” she said — must meet the Times v. Sullivan requirements, meaning that the media has “complete immunity from liability.”

“Complete immunity”? That is, except for all the media firms that Locke and her firm have successfully sued. Asked how her firm could prosper in such an environment, Locke responded via email, “The simple answer is because we’ve become expert in this area of law and practice unlike any other firm in the country.”

Amid the Sullivan bashing, DeSantis sought to distinguish himself from “run of the mill” people: “Me, they come after me and they do do a lot of slander,” the governor said. “But I fight back. I have a platform to fight back, so it’s a lot easier for me.”

With that, DeSantis endorsed a bedrock principle of ... the New York Times v. Sullivan doctrine. The notion that politicians, celebrities and the like have the wherewithal to rebut negative press has deep grounding in case law. In the oft-cited 1974 case Gertz v. Welch, for instance, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. wrote, “Public officials and public figures usually enjoy significantly greater access to the channels of effective communication, and hence have a more realistic opportunity to counteract false statements than private individuals normally enjoy. Private individuals are therefore more vulnerable to injury.” Private individuals, that is, such as Sandmann, who as a high school student sued multiple news outlets over his portrayal during a January 2019 encounter with a Native American activist at the Lincoln Memorial. Sandmann secured settlements with The Post, CNN and NBC News, though his lawsuits against several other media outlets, including the New York Times and ABC News, were dismissed last year.

Despite his perhaps accidental support for a tenet of New York Times v. Sullivan, DeSantis has mulled legislation to undo it. As the Orlando Sentinel’s Skyler Swisher reported last May, a top DeSantis staffer has worked on a bill — not yet introduced — that would:

Establish that the “failure to validate or corroborate the alleged defamatory statement" is evidence of actual malice.

Institute a presumption that “statements by anonymous sources are presumed to be false.”
Narrow the range of people who are deemed public figures for the purpose of defamation actions.

A problem: “Failure to validate or corroborate” a defamatory statement is just a fancy way of describing a big mistake. In New York Times v. Sullivan, the Supreme Court protected media outlets from large jury awards for mere screwups when the aggrieved party was a public official, on the rationale that public discourse would suffer if media outlets feared for their survival every time they published a critical piece. What does this mean? Puff pieces would proliferate in a world ruled by DeSantis.

Presuming that anonymously attributed material is false would effectively require media organizations to affirmatively prove the truth of their reporting in court — a reversal of the current system, under which plaintiffs generally must prove the falsity of allegedly defamatory statements. The effect would be to stifle investigative reporting on public figures of all ideological hues.


Is DeSantis ready to push for these measures in the Florida legislature? He’ll say more soon on a “whole bunch of different issues,” he promised last week. If enacted, the governor’s libel reform ideas might land at the Supreme Court, which last year declined to revisit New York Times v. Sullivan.

But who knows — perhaps it would entertain one of DeSantis’s piecemeal tweaks, which would pose a far greater threat to U.S. media than the empty Trump pledge.



Opinion by Erik WempleErik Wemple, The Washington Post's media critic, focuses on the cable-news industry. Before joining The Post, he ran a short-lived and much publicized local online news operation, and for eight years served as editor of Washington City Paper. Twitter

Feinstein’s retirement and America’s generational shift

Analysis by Philip Bump

National columnist

February 15, 2023 

In its specifics, the story is uncomplicated. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) will not seek reelection in 2024, a year in which she will turn 91. This decision has been telegraphed for some time, with other California Democrats announcing unusually caveated campaigns to succeed her (“if Feinstein retires, I am pleased to announce …”). Her announcement Tuesday simply formalized the transition.

But, in broader terms, it encapsulates a unique facet of the United States at the moment. There are always younger politicians nipping at the heels of older ones. It’s unusual, though, for the Senate to be so old — just as it’s unusual for so many older Americans still to be working or holding positions that might otherwise go to younger people. Feinstein’s slow decision is one of millions of individual decisions among the country’s older population not to retire — resulting in an unusual grip on the country by an unusually large population.

Feinstein’s announcement is intertwined with a news report that came out a few hours earlier: There are more older Americans now than at any prior point in American history. More than 1 in 6 Americans were age 65 or older in 2020. By 2030, the Census Bureau expects, 1 in 5 will be

There are two main reasons for this. The first is that American life expectancy has increased substantially over the past few decades (before dipping during the coronavirus pandemic). The second and larger reason is that the baby boom generation, which reshaped the United States every year as it grew older, is now in the middle of its retirement. Most retirees are baby boomers now, but tens of millions of boomers, nearly all of whom are 60 or older, are still working.

Consider what this older U.S. population means for the Senate, an institution that is limited in size and favors incumbency. Feinstein is not the oldest senator ever to be sworn in; that honor goes to Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.). But she is the oldest serving member of the Senate, having been born in June 1933, more than a decade before the baby boom began.

She is also one of three serving senators born in the 1930s. The second-oldest, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), won reelection last year at age 89.

In recent decades, the age of senators when sworn in has been trending upward. The six-year average of the age of new senators hit 61.4 in 2021, dropping slightly in the two years since. In 1921, the six-year average was 54.9. In 1821, it was 44.4.

In part, this is thanks to incumbency. If you win election when you’re 40 and then win reelection three times, you’re being sworn in for a new term at age 58. It’s not that older people are being elected anew; it’s primarily that senators are aging.

So far this decade, more than half of the senators being sworn in for new terms were 60 or older. That was true in the 2010s as well. The aging trend has been happening since the 1970s, when senators being sworn in were unusually young.

Why? In part because the U.S. population was younger and was choosing younger candidates. You have to be 30 to be a senator and, in 1976, the first baby boomers started turning 30.

So we have an older Senate populated by a number of older senators who’ve been serving for some time. There are only 100 Senate seats in total and only two in California, so if you are a younger Californian (or even a not-that-much-younger one) hoping to enter the Senate, you simply have to bide your time. That there are more older people who can hold those positions for an extended period of time limits upward movement.

Now extrapolate this. Even assuming the likelihood of people to retire at a specific age is constant (if, for example, 50 percent of 65-year-olds always retire), a big increase in the number of 65-year-olds necessarily means more 65-year-olds continuing to work. Meaning that those jobs that would otherwise be opened up aren’t. We can extend this in other ways: If people tend to move into smaller homes after they retire, more people staying in their current homes tamps down housing availability.

This is vastly oversimplified, of course. The Senate is not like most employers. But it is clearly the case that, in other occupations, the workforce is trending older. In 2001, the median age of a U.S. worker was 39.6. In 2021, it was 41.7. In 2031, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects, it will be 42.6. Those are jobs not available to younger workers.

We’ve heard this refrain a lot recently, including in former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley’s announcement of her 2024 presidential bid: It’s time for generational change in politics. Again, this is often opportunistic. But it’s also a reflection of a large, younger generation feeling that its opportunities are limited because older Americans are lingering.

To those older Americans, of course, what they are doing is simply living their lives. It’s just that there are many more of them than there used to be.

Democrat seeks documents about $2 billion Saudi investment in Kushner fund

Rep. Jamie Raskin says he is ‘deeply troubled’ by a prior refusal from Kushner to turn over relevant information


By Michael Kranish

February 15, 2023 

President Donald Trump meets with Mohammed bin Salman, then Saudi Arabia's deputy crown prince, in the Oval Office in 2017. White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, right, listens. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

A senior Democrat on Tuesday renewed a request to Jared Kushner for documents outlining how the former White House official received $2 billion from a Saudi investment fund, writing that Kushner had failed to respond to an earlier inquiry and raising new questions about whether he had “improperly traded” on his government work to benefit his financial interests.

The letter from Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (Md.), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, cited a Washington Post story published online Saturday and other reports that he said raised disturbing questions about Kushner’s relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Mohammed chairs a sovereign wealth fund that invested in Kushner’s private equity fund, known as Affinity Partners, soon after Kushner left a White House position that dealt regularly with Saudi affairs.

“I am deeply troubled by your continued refusal to produce documents regarding the Saudi government’s $2 billion investment in your fund in light of recent prominent reporting that Saudi Arabia made that investment in Affinity just months after you left a senior White House position where you were responsible for shaping Middle East policy,” Raskin wrote to Kushner.

Raskin’s letter also requested that Kushner identify all foreign investors in his company.

Kushner did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Raskin’s letter followed up on a request in June from the committee, which at the time was controlled by Democrats, for the documents.

While Kushner’s company turned over nearly 2,000 pages in response, Raskin revealed in Tuesday’s letter that they mostly amounted to publicly available documents that do “not substantively relate to the Saudi government’s investment in the firm.” Raskin wrote that when the committee followed up in October, the company’s legal officer did not respond.

With Republicans now in control of the House, Raskin this week asked the committee’s chairman, Rep. James Comer (Ky.), to co-sign the letter. Comer, asked Sunday on ABC News’s “This Week” whether he would push for an investigation into Kushner just as he is probing actions by President Biden’s son Hunter Biden, had responded that “everything is on the table.”

But Comer said in a statement Tuesday to The Post that he would not co-sign Raskin’s letter, a decision that could make it harder for House Democrats to obtain the information from Kushner.

“Ranking Member Raskin and Committee Democrats have a long way to go to prove they are interested in true oversight after having spent the past two years giving the Biden Administration a free pass,” Comer said. “If Democrats want to join Committee Republicans in our ongoing efforts, including investigating Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s suspicious business schemes with foreign adversaries, then we can discuss joining together on future requests. Until then, Committee Republicans will continue seeking answers for the American people about the current Administration’s activities.”

Raskin’s request is expected to be picked up by a concurrent investigation by the Senate Finance Committee and its chairman, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.). “The financial links between the Saudi royal family and the Trump family raise very serious issues, and when you factor in Jared Kushner’s financial interests, you are looking right at the cat’s cradle of financial entanglements,” Wyden told The Post last week.

Raskin said in an interview Tuesday that while he still hoped Comer would cooperate, “We will definitely work with our partners in the Senate to get all of the information we need in order to conduct a thorough and detailed investigation of all of the conflicts of interests that we need to learn about.”

Raskin said he was “not going to allow this to be some kind of lopsided partisan witch hunt. Let’s have a serious investigation into public policy and the profound ethical concerns that have been raised.”

As President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Kushner worked closely with Mohammed, who became crown prince in part by leveraging his ties to the Trump administration, which provided arms sales and other benefits. Trump also provided crucial support by refusing to endorse a CIA finding that Mohammed had ordered the killing or capture of Jamal Khashoggi, a Post contributing columnist who had been critical of the crown prince’s policies. Trump has said that he “saved” Mohammed, and former secretary of state Mike Pompeo wrote in his recent memoir that he was told by Trump to visit with the crown prince and “tell him he owes us.”

The Saudi Public Investment Fund has also financed LIV Golf, which is holding tournaments on Trump’s golf courses. It is unclear how much Trump earns from that arrangement. A Trump spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his letter to Kushner, Raskin wrote, “Your efforts to protect the Crown Prince may have allowed him to maintain his position at the top of the Saudi government and, thus, his ability to deliver significant financial benefits to you and your father-in-law after the end of the Trump Administration.”

Raskin noted that when the committee contacted Kushner’s company in June, it responded that it had “nothing to hide” and was “committed to working with the Committee to provide appropriate details, documents, and information to help inform your investigation.”

While Affinity eventually provided some documents, Raskin wrote, it “failed to produce a single communication related to the reasons behind your firm’s receipt of $2 billion from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund.”

The congressman asked for the documents to be provided by March 1.

TikTok’s CEO launches aggressive push to fend off a ban of popular app

In an exclusive interview, Shou Zi Chew said he’s working to persuade lawmakers that TikTok poses no threat. Things aren’t going exactly to plan.

By Drew Harwell

Updated February 15, 2023 

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew poses for a portrait at the company's office in Washington on Tuesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

After months of virtual silence, TikTok’s chief executive Shou Zi Chew is preparing for the fight of his professional life, meeting with members of Congress and state governors as part of an aggressive push to prove the wildly popular Chinese-owned app is not a national security threat.

“There are more than 100 million voices in this country, and I think it’ll be a real shame if our users around the world are not able to hear them anymore,” Chew said Tuesday during an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, referring to the number of U.S. TikTok users.

“We have to have tough conversations on: Who is using it now? What kind of value does it bring to them? What does it mean if we just, like, rip it out of their hands?” he added. “I don’t take this conversation of ‘let’s just ban TikTok’ very lightly. … I don’t think it’s a trivial question. I don’t think it should be something that’s decided, you know, in 280 characters.”

The married father of two, a Harvard Business School graduate based in his native Singapore, spent Tuesday in the halls of Congress trying to convince lawmakers that the company is not run — as some argue — by Chinese government lackeys, propagandists or spies.

It’s unclear whether the strategy will pay off. After he met with Sen. Michael F. Bennet, the Colorado Democrat’s staff caught TikTok officials by surprise by announcing that, while the senator appreciated Chew’s time, he remained unconvinced, arguing that TikTok was “an unacceptable risk to U.S. national security” and threatened a “poisonous influence” on American teens.

TikTok said it respectfully disagrees with Bennet’s characterization of its company and will continue to work on educating members of Congress and building trust.

The U.S. Capitol in December. (Elizabeth Frantz/For The Washington Post)

A TikTok event for the Grammy awards this month in Los Angeles. (Joe Scarnici/Getty Images)

TikTok is not without friends in the United States. Chew arrived in Washington this week after attending the Super Bowl, where an official with TikTok parent ByteDance said he was a guest of NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell. The league is a major promotional partner of the app, where videos of big plays are viral and heavily promoted, including by the NFL’s 10 million-follower official account.

Chew even broadcast the halftime show in a TikTok video: “Amazing @rihanna !,” he said.

An NFL spokesman didn’t dispute Chew’s attendance but said he was not in the commissioner’s suite. Still, that’s better than the welcome he’s getting in Washington. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who met with Chew this week, told The Post he did so “as a courtesy” but that his belief that TikTok represented a unique threat to American interests was completely unchanged.

And what was once a Republican-led crusade against TikTok has attracted some Democratic endorsement. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), whose daughter works for Facebook, said Sunday that a TikTok ban “should be looked at.”

“I don’t think there’s anything they can say,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii). “It’s all about what they do, and what they do is pretty alarming.”

How TikTok ate the internet

TikTok’s executives had for years hoped the company’s backroom negotiations with national security officials — and its viral-dance-filled self-promotion as the “last sunny corner of the internet” — would neutralize suspicions in Washington over the app’s China-based ownership.

But with criticism heating up, Chew has launched a room-to-room offensive on Capitol Hill, meeting with federal and state lawmakers, journalists and think tanks in an effort to persuade critics that concerns about data privacy and censorship can be resolved without the nuclear option of a nationwide ban.

Asked if they’d gained any allies in Washington, TikTok officials this week suggested Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), who’d recently offered some mild support of the company’s “working with U.S. intelligence” on “proper precautions.” Booker’s representatives did not respond to requests for comment.

“We understand we start from a place of trust deficit,” Chew said, “and that trust is not won by one move, one silver bullet, one meeting.”

Chew said he is hopeful that members of Congress will come around to see TikTok as many of its users do, a place for creativity and free expression, and acknowledge that some of their anxieties about online data or teenage use relate to bigger issues that should be resolved by industry-wide policy instead of a single-app ban.

But he said he has also had to navigate discussions with people who have never used TikTok but still argue in tweets and TV interviews that the app is an insidious threat — and that the company’s arguments are compromised, foolish or naive.

Many of the suspicions he’s tried to address, he said, have been “misinformed” or based on “misrepresentations.” TikTok officials have also been frustrated by what they feel is unfair influence from TikTok’s top competitor, the Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta, which has funded a secret media and lobbying campaign to portray the app as a foreign-owned threat to American youth.

“We should be competing on product and user experience,” Chew said. “That’s the right way to compete.”

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew poses for a portrait at the company's office in Washington on Tuesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

TikTok is a private company with major Western investors, nearly a dozen international offices and thousands of American employees. But its parent company, ByteDance, was created by Chinese founders and operates a central office in Beijing — a fact that U.S. lawmakers have argued could leave them vulnerable to China’s authoritarian style of online surveillance and media control.

The U.S. government has shared no evidence that the Chinese Communist Party has mined TikTok’s data for information on American users or warped its recommendation algorithm to score political points. But both concerns have become prominent themes of criticism in the United States, leading to regular attacks on the app in Washington and more than two dozen state-device bans.

TikTok officials have started preparing Chew for his first major congressional appearance next month before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and most expect he will be grilled relentlessly. His deputy, Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas, sat for a fiery hearing in September during which Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) labeled TikTok a “walking security nightmare.”

As Washington wavers on TikTok, Beijing exerts control

TikTok says it has spent $1.5 billion — and expects to spend another $700 million a year — standing up a corporate restructuring plan, known as Project Texas, that would subject the company to a level of U.S. government influence and oversight unmatched by any of its American rivals

TikTok’s U.S. operations would be sequestered in a subsidiary, known as TikTok U.S. Data Security, whose leaders would be vetted by the U.S. government and whose U.S. user data would be closely monitored and firewalled.

Some measures have already been launched, including the opening last month of a code-review center in Columbia, Md., where officials from the Texas-based tech giant Oracle can inspect TikTok’s algorithm and source code for possible flaws. TikTok officials have argued to lawmakers that this style of intense government monitoring and compliance is more commonly seen with military or defense contractors, not social media apps.

But the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the cross-government panel known as CFIUS that has led negotiations between TikTok and the U.S. for three years, has yet to approve the restructuring package or publicly state any outstanding concerns.

Executives for Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter testified before a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing in September. (Sarah Silbiger/For The Washington Post)

Chew said TikTok gave CFIUS a full blueprint of the proposal in August and that the company is “still waiting for feedback.” A CFIUS official did not respond to a request for comment.

Some in Washington point to risks such as a Chinese law that allows the government to compel tech companies to hand over user data to assist with “national intelligence” work.

Chew said that the Chinese government has never asked for U.S. user data and that, “even if they did, we believe we don’t have to give it to them because U.S. user data is subject to U.S. law.”

But critics such as Klon Kitchen, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, argue that TikTok’s promise is a meaningless “smokescreen,” and that only a complete divestiture from Chinese ownership can address the concerns.

“They don’t have to be malevolent actors, they simply have to be compliant,” Kitchen said. “And for Chinese companies, either you’re compliant or you’re out of business.”

Is TikTok really giving your data to China?

TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, also undermined its argument in December when it announced it had fired four employees for trying to use TikTok data — including IP addresses, which can provide rough estimates of locations — to hunt down journalists’ sources.

Chew called the instance “very disturbing” and blamed it on a “completely misguided” group of employees acting without corporate approval. He noted that the leader of the group was an American and said the company had started restructuring its internal-audit team to prevent it from happening again.

“We didn’t want to hide this or sweep it under the rug,” he said. “Bad actors and instances like this really sort of erode all the work that we have done.”

Chew, a former Facebook intern and ByteDance finance chief who became TikTok’s CEO in 2021, said he is in charge of all of TikTok’s strategic decisions. But ByteDance has played an active role in TikTok’s shift to defend itself more aggressively in Washington, Chew said, and he could not provide a specific instance on which he had pushed back against a decree from ByteDance’s leadership.

Chew said he routinely updates ByteDance chief and co-founder Liang Rubo on “certain topics that I think he may have an interesting point of view, just to make sure the perspective is complete.”

Chew’s meetings come at a tense moment for U.S.-China relations as lawmakers discuss how to respond to a Chinese spy balloon, whose presence some critics used to highlight TikTok’s potential for spying or propaganda — even though the app shared hours of colorfully subversive videos related to the episode, many from an unfiltered American point of view.

“We cannot be removed from the larger discussion. But that’s not really our business. … It’s a distraction,” Chew said. “We are not the first nor the last company to be associated with all sorts of unfair analogies.”

TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew poses for a portrait at the company's office in Washington on Tuesday. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post)

Though an executive on par with Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, Chew remains almost entirely unknown, both on Capitol Hill and in the general public. His TikTok account (“shou.time”) has 17,000 followers and features mostly touristy style videos of attending the Met Gala, posing for photos with celebrities such as Bill Murray, and visiting TikTok’s offices in Los Angeles and New York. (In a video styled after TikTok’s “teenage dirtbag” viral challenge, Shou, 40, showed photos of himself as a young man growing up in Singapore.)

His public persona could change after next month’s hearing — including, possibly, to cement him as the face of a company some in Congress argue could warp the brains of American youth. But he said he is hopeful that lawmakers will one day see his side.

“I am a very big believer that, ultimately, facts win,” he said. “Ultimately, people are rational. Yes, it will feel uncomfortable at times. But I think we are trending in the right direction by bringing more facts to the table.”

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

By Drew HarwellDrew Harwell is a reporter for The Washington Post covering artificial intelligence and the algorithms changing our lives. He was a member of an international reporting team that won a George Polk Award in 2021.