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Last year, TikTok officials pledged to seal off US user data from China, where parent company ByteDance is based. So far, its efforts are not inspiring confidence. According to the Wall Street Journal, Project Texas has been in trouble since its inception in 2021. Employees in the unit were reportedly unable to save data to their laptops, preventing any meaningful content analysis. They were also expected to verify and approve any changes to the algorithm coming through from ByteDance’s Chinese headquarters, but according to employees the changes came through so often and so fast that they were unable to properly check most of them. ByteDance’s CEO Shou Zi Chew touted Project Texas in his Congressional Testimony in March 2023 as a voluntary project to assuage concerns about the Chinese government’s involvement in the company. If the reports are true, it looks like the company has spent $1.5 billion on a porous promise of US isolationism.