• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, July 21, 2022

Chinese-based company ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, spent $2.1 million on lobbying in the second quarter of 2022 -- up 130% from the previous quarter. The company also spent $4.7 million for the year in 2021, according to a public disclosure.

ByteDance, which lobbied on a variety of issues, recorded the amount spent in the document, filed Wednesday.

One piece of legislation it discussed was the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, the key antitrust bill that would stop dominant technology platforms from favoring their own offerings compared with rivals that rely on their services.

It also lobbied on the two versions of a large funding bill aimed at boosting American competitiveness in semiconductors against China.

Included in the efforts were a a handful of online privacy bills, a defense spending bill and a bill to ban TikTok from Department of Homeland Security devices, according to CNBC.

TikTok continues to have a torrid relationship with the Untied States. It has been working with Oracle for more than a year on several measures as part of a commercial relationship to better safeguard its app, systems, and the security of U.S. user data.

In June 2022, the company reported changing its default storage location of U.S. user data. All U.S. user traffic now routes to the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The company, however, said it still uses its U.S. and Singapore data centers for backup, but as it continues work on the project, the company expects to delete U.S. users' private data from our own data centers and fully pivot to Oracle cloud servers located in the U.S.