Welcome to access for a rata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank, Ideas Bank here. I'm Danper Mack. On today's show, Facebook and Google consider new political ad rules and big money for former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.

But first, the fight over TikTok.

So earlier this week, Congress held a hearing titled how corporations and big tech leave our data exposed to criminals, China, and other bad actors, otherwise known as Cabtlo dekoba.

Anyway, the whole thing really devolved into a slam session on TikTok.

The short form video app used mostly by kids, teens, and millennials,

to post videos of themselves lip syncing to their favorite songs.

TikTok is owned by a Chinese company called ByteDance, and there are two big fears.

First, that the Chinese government could be collecting all sorts of data on America's children.

Two, that TikTok is censoring certain content at the direction of Beijing.

Now, TikTok itself didn't show up at the hearing, but in a blog post, denied both charges.

When it came to data, it said that its information is stored on

U.S. servers and that it isn't shared with the parent company, let alone with the government.

On content, TikTok seems to admit that it may have once blocked politically sensitive stuff,

but that those were in the early growing pain stages of the company, and now it's taken

steps to make U.S. content moderators independent from content

moderators elsewhere. And for what it's worth, BuzzFeed recently found that TikToks of Hong Kong

protests went up and stayed up. Why it matters is that all of this plays into a broader

political blowback against the power of big tech, but this time using China as a cudgel.

The outcome could impact the future of

tech innovation, access, and privacy. In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper with Republican Senator

Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. But first, this. This episode is brought to you by Silicon

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