Congress demands accountability TikTok won't give

TikTok cancelled a scheduled congressional hearing on child safety this month, and Congressman John Moolenaar called it evasion. What matters is not whether he was right, but what TikTok's absence permits: Congress to demand answers without receiving them. The company to avoid making statements under oath that might later constrain its business. This is not new.

In 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook's leadership sent lawyers and lower executives to child-safety-focused meetings rather than Mark Zuckerberg himself. The strategic result was that lawmakers could express fury without forcing anyone accountable to commit to specific safeguards. When no one at the table has authority to bind the company to future practice, outrage becomes theater.

TikTok's stated reasons for cancellation are absent from the public record. Moolenaar interprets the move as fear of scrutiny. The company has not explained whether operational constraints, legal strategy, or deliberate refusal drove the decision. That silence is itself revealing. A platform genuinely committed to demonstrating child safety practices would likely send someone empowered to discuss them on record.

But here is the harder truth: Congress has not always pressed hard enough to make that appearance costly. When a company declines to send an executive who can commit to concrete changes, lawmakers often accept subordinates who offer reassurances instead. Eighteen months after Facebook's 2018 avoidance strategy, meaningful child-protection regulations still had not materialized. The company had successfully used the space between congressional demand and legal obligation to protect its product decisions from the constraint of public commitment.

The question facing Congress now is whether it will accept the same script again. If TikTok's chief security officer finally appears—or does not—what Congress needs to extract is not performance but specificity: named practices, measurable timelines, enforcement mechanisms that bind the company whether or not cameras are rolling. Absent that, evasion and compliance become indistinguishable. Child safety remains something platforms discuss rather than something they are forced to actually do.