Technology History | 2123 Rayburn — Five Hours, One Witness, and a Law Thirteen Months Later

The witness list for the hearing in room 2123 had one name on it. Shou Zi Chew, chief executive of TikTok, had never appeared before a congressional committee before the morning of 23 March 2023. The room is the John D. Dingell Room in the Rayburn House Office Building, the main hearing room of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and the committee had it booked for ten o'clock. Its announcement gave the hearing a title that told you the two arguments in advance: "TikTok: How Congress Can Safeguard American Data Privacy and Protect Children from Online Harms." Questioning ran past five hours. Chew told members the app had 150 million monthly users in the United States, and set out Project Texas, the arrangement under which American user data would sit on Oracle-run servers walled off from ByteDance in Beijing. Members of both parties were unpersuaded, and that was the actual news of the day — bipartisan agreement on a technology question had become rare enough to be a finding in itself. Reporting afterwards noted a second pattern in the room. Chew is Singaporean, said so more than once, and was questioned anyway as a man presumed to answer to Beijing. Very few new facts came out of those five hours. What came out was consensus, and consensus is what a hearing is for. Thirteen months later Congress passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which gave ByteDance a choice between severing TikTok's American operation and losing access to American app stores, and President Biden signed it in April 2024. The chain from this room to that statute is short and unusually legible, which is not something you can often say about a congressional hearing. Rayburn sits on Independence Avenue southwest of the Capitol, finished in 1965, the third and largest of the House office buildings. The committee said the hearing would be open to the public and the press, and streamed it; the video is still posted, and 2123 still hosts full-committee hearings on the same schedule it did that Thursday. Photo: USCapitol, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait of Shou Zi Chew: Lukasz Kobus, European Union, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons — taken in Brussels in January 2023, two months before the hearing, not in the room.