ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, has continued to up its lobbying effort spending more than $13 million.
TikTok, the widely popular video app, is now the fourth largest internet company spending on federal lobbying.
As of 2022, the companies spent $5.4 million on lobbying, according to available information collected by OpenSecrets, a Washington non-profit that tracks campaign finance and lobbying data.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, ByteDance spent $1.2 million on lobbying, according to Fox News. The number of federal bills that ByteDance has been lobbying on increased to 14 in 2022 from eight in 2020.
ByteDance had hired lobbyists, including former U.S. senators Trent Lott and John Breaux and David Urban, a former senior adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
In November, TikTok hired Jamal Brown, a deputy press secretary at the Pentagon who was national press secretary for Joe Biden’s presidential campaign. Mr Brown’s job was to manage policy communications for the Americas, focusing on the U.S.
“This is kind of the template for how modern tech lobbying goes,” Dan Auble, a senior researcher at OpenSecrets, said, “These companies come on the scene and suddenly start spending substantial amounts of money, and ByteDance has certainly done that.”
The U.S. have criticised TikTok as a security risk due to ties between ByteDance and the Chinese government. The American government is worried that user data collected by TikTok could be passed to Beijing just as lawmakers have been trying to regulate or even ban the app in the U.S.
In 2019, TikTok paid a $5.7 million fine as part of a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over violating children’s privacy rights.
Mr Trump’s administration had attempted to ban downloads of TikTok from app stores and outlaw transactions between Americans and ByteDance.
