(Bloomberg) — TikTok dropped out of an upcoming meeting with the House Select Committee on China on national security issues, saying it couldn’t participate because of unrelated child-safety litigation, the leader of the panel said.

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The company is “refusing to appear citing its own desire to avoid broader scrutiny of its child safety practices,” said US Representative John Moolenaar, a Michigan Republican, and the chairman of the committee.

The bipartisan congressional roundtable, months in the making, was set to take place Sept. 15 and focus on lawmakers’ questions about TikTok’s US business that was spun out earlier this year from China-based ByteDance Ltd. to majority-American owners under a national security deal. The US company had agreed to send its chief security officer, Will Farrell, to discuss how the new venture is safeguarding TikTok’s algorithm and Americans’ data from Chinese influence, but backed out on Aug. 27, Moolenaar said.

The day before TikTok’s decision, Meta Platforms Inc. had reached an $18 billion settlement with state attorneys general over claims that its products had hooked and harmed a generation of young users. Meta then swiftly launched a pressure campaign to push TikTok and Google’s YouTube to join it in adopting stronger, industrywide protections for teens across social media. Neither company has responded publicly to those demands. TikTok did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“They claimed that in light of Meta’s settlement with state attorneys general, they wouldn’t be able to answer questions on child-safety issues,” Moolenaar said Wednesday in an interview. But no part of the roundtable was meant to focus on kids, he said. The intent has instead been to assure the public that TikTok is following a national security law aimed at protecting Americans from foreign adversaries, including China, and increase transparency around how the app is operating under its new ownership.

The cancellation for another reason “raises serious questions on the algorithm, access to Americans’ data, what kind of influence the CCP continues to have with TikTok,” Moolenaar said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party. “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.’ But the fact that they canceled, to me, really undermines their credibility.”

Moolenaar said it was unclear whether the directive to drop out had come from TikTok US, which oversees its safety and security efforts, or from ByteDance, which still owns a 19.9% stake in the company’s US operations and controls the most valuable parts of its business. That “goes to the heart of the concerns that remain about TikTok — its ownership, its loyalties, its commitment to the American people,” he said.

TikTok, Meta, YouTube and Snap Inc. have been defendants this year in closely watched national litigation alleging that the top social media platforms were designed to addict minors. The companies maintain that their products were not built to encourage compulsive use, and that they have protections in place to prevent it.

Though TikTok and its peers have reached confidential settlements in several of these cases, they still face thousands brought by young plaintiffs and their families and public school districts across the country. Numerous state attorneys general also are pursuing action against TikTok. Some states also are targeting Google and Snap.

In August, TikTok and ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to resolve a separate Biden-era lawsuit by the Justice Department accusing the popular app of collecting data on children in violation of an online privacy law. The 2024 suit alleged the company let millions of children under the age of 13 create accounts without their parents’ knowledge or consent while making it difficult for parents to request the deletion of those accounts. The settlement requires court approval.

Earlier this week, TikTok and YouTube were absent from an event convened by the Trump administration’s Office of the Surgeon General on combating the harms of excessive screen use in American children. Safety chiefs from Meta and Snap were present, drawing even more attention to those missing in action.

“We’re disappointed that they backed out and we’re going to continue to work toward having these questions answered,” Moolenaar said Wednesday. The committee is trying to schedule another gathering before the end of the year and plans to again invite the new TikTok US CEO, Adam Presser. “TikTok’s missed another opportunity to be transparent and open, and that doesn’t speak well for TikTok.”

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