TikTok has pulled out of a September 15 roundtable with the House Select Committee on China, according to Bloomberg, walking away from a session lawmakers had spent months arranging to examine how the platform’s newly restructured U.S. business safeguards American data and its recommendation algorithm from Chinese influence.

Committee Chairman John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, said TikTok backed out on August 27 after the company told him it could not answer questions because of unrelated child-safety litigation. TikTok’s Chief Security Officer, Will Farrell, had agreed to appear and discuss data privacy and cybersecurity at the new U.S. joint venture. Moolenaar said the roundtable was never intended to focus on children’s safety. 

“They had an opportunity to inspire confidence that the law was being met and could have simply at the roundtable said, ‘By advice of counsel, we are not able to answer questions, due to legal proceedings, on child safety issues,'” Moolenaar said in a statement. “But the fact that they canceled, to me, really undermines their credibility.”

The company withdrew a day after Meta reached an estimated $18 billion settlement with a coalition of state attorneys general over allegations it misled the public about mental health harms to young users on Facebook and Instagram. Meta then pushed TikTok and YouTube to adopt comparable protections.

Moolenaar said he could not determine whether the decision to skip the hearing came from TikTok U.S., which handles the platform’s safety and security operations, or from ByteDance, which retains a 19.9% stake in the U.S. entity and, per Moolenaar, controls its most valuable segments. “That goes to the heart of the concerns that remain about TikTok, its ownership, its loyalties, its commitment to the American people,” he said.

The hearing traces back further than the current dispute. Reuters reported in July that Farrell’s planned September 15 testimony would mark the first public appearance by a TikTok U.S. executive before the House since ByteDance finalized the January deal splitting the U.S. app into a separate joint venture, TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, with Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX as managing investors. Reuters noted that ByteDance has disclosed few details of that arrangement, and that TikTok U.S. CEO Adam Presser was not expected to attend the September session regardless.

Moolenaar said the committee is trying to schedule another meeting before year’s end and again plans to invite Presser. TikTok, along with Meta, YouTube and Snap, remains a defendant in national litigation alleging its product design encourages compulsive use among minors, and TikTok and ByteDance agreed in August to pay $400 million to resolve a separate Justice Department suit over the collection of children’s data, a settlement that still requires court approval.

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