What is Project Texas, TikTok’s best chance to avoid a ban?

TikTok knows it's in trouble, and it has come up with a solution: Project Texas.

Lawmakers in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Britain, France, and more countries have all implemented various bans of the app due to fears that TikTok is giving user data to the Chinese government. One investigative journalist uncovered examples of employees at ByteDance, a Chinese technology firm that owns TikTok, performing high-tech surveillance on journalists. She also found that user data supposedly quarantined in the U.S. was accessed from China. While this is all deeply troubling, experts don't agree about the degree of the Chinese government's involvement. 

In the U.S. the effort behind the ban seems aggressive, but it hasn’t had much of an impact beyond political statements. The app is banned on government devices, but people working in the government can still use the app on their personal phones. And many universities have banned the app on institutional wifi and devices, a move that just forces students to use a different WiFi connection or their cellular plan to access TikTok instead.

Last week, TikTok CEO Shou Chew had his first appearance before Congress where it became increasingly clear that there is bipartisan support for a ban on the app. Chew’s answer? Project Texas, a $1.5-billion attempt to gain American confidence in TikTok’s security.

"Our approach has never been to dismiss or trivialize any of [your] concerns," Chew told lawmakers at the hearing. "We have addressed them with real action now. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last two years, building what amounts to a firewall. The seals of protected US user data from unauthorized foreign access. The bottom line is this American data stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel. We call this initiative Project Texas."

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Project Texas is meant to soothe a request the Biden administration made earlier this month: If TikTok's Chinese owners don't sell their stakes in the app to a U.S. company, the app would be banned.

Project Texas would restructure much of the corporate arm of TikTok so that U.S. user data is stored by a U.S. company (Oracle), a company based in a U.S. city (Austin, Texas). According to Texas Monthly, Project Texas's operations would be monitored by an in-house committee approved by the U.S. government called TikTok U.S. Data Security. Project Texas would essentially act as a firewall, ensuring that the Chinese government couldn't access U.S. user data and that Oracle would oversee it all.

"The way we’ve built this plan, and the level of external oversight, is really meant to make it so that you don’t have to take my word for it or Oracle’s word for it," Brooke Oberwetter, TikTok’s head of policy communications, told Texas Monthly. "There will be multiple layers of oversight by multiple federal agencies, multiple outside consultants, security vendors, and auditors."

The initiative began rolling out in July 2022, but until Project Texas is complete, Beijing-based employees of TikTok can still access U.S. user data. Chew said during his congressional hearing that he isn't sure when Project Texas will be complete, but promised that it is "progressing quite well."

Even though it is far from complete, Chew made Project Texas out to be a solution for every problem thrown his way multiple times throughout the hearing. He’d admit that something wasn’t ideal now, but will be under Project Texas — an answer lawmakers didn’t think was particularly helpful. Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers called Project Texas a "marketing scheme." Democrat Rep. Frank Pallone called it "simply not acceptable." Republican Rep. Bob Latta said he doesn't think the project will actually be particularly "useful." 

Despite the bipartisan agreement that Project Texas isn't an across-the-board solution, Chew stayed steadfast.

"I think we have designed Project Texas to protect U.S. user interests and to move forward here in the U.S.," Chew said. "Again, it’s the protection of storing American data on American soil by an American company looked after by American personnel."

The hearing made it clear that the U.S. wants to ban TikTok, and that TikTok sees Project Texas as its way out of that ban. It's still unclear, though, if a ban will come before the project can be fully functional — rendering it useless — or if U.S. legislators will give the social media platform more time and leniency.