Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great, we have the usual anti-privacy companies there as well as ByteDance .. what can go wrong.
It's insane enough letting Big Corps lobby your legislature and even write language that eventually gets enshrined as law. It's even more insane we allow the state-affiliated entities of our adversaries to do this.
Well, it would be rather pointless to elect to hire a representative to represent you and then not take time to make your position known with them. They certainly are not mind readers.
And you can't realistically remove big businesses from citizenry as those who are stakeholders in big business are going to bias their position to what benefits their business. Business is people, after all. ByteDance certainly has stakeholders who are American citizens.
So we make a best effort to register those biases for the sake of transparency. The only real alternative, short of abandoning democracy entirely, is to leave it a mystery who talked to their representatives.