High anxiety exposed in TikTok probe

The seat left empty by TikTok in a congressional hearing on "how corporations and big tech leave our data exposed to criminal, China and other bad actors" in Washington on Tuesday showed the company's attitude to US legislators' seemingly thoughtful exercising of their duties, which, however, is nothing but a politically motivated abuse of public power.

With all its US customers' data stored in the United States and backed up in Singapore, and a US auditing company watching over its data security practices, the social media video app operator, whose parent company is headquartered in Beijing, has a clean record of operation in the US and more than 150 other countries.

But it has had a meteoric rise. Within two years, TikTok has become one of the most popular apps of its kind.