The CEO of the company testified before congress after the Biden administration insisted that TikTok’s Chinese owners sell stakes in order to avoid a U.S. ban.
Chew was questioned at the hearing on Thursday regarding the security of the social media app, the dissemination of false information and harmful content, and worries around Chinese state access to TikTok user data in the United States. According to NBC News, Republican Washington representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers was one of the first to question Chew and expressed concern that TikTok “surveils us all.” The committee was very hostile toward Chew and didn’t seem to be persuaded by his arguments.
Rodgers suggested that the Chinese Communist Party uses the app as “a tool to manipulate America as a whole,” and that the app will never “embrace American values.” She called for the ban of TikTok, while Democratic New Jersey rep Frank Pallone highlighted that children and teenagers were among those most vulnerable to its “addictive and damaging features.”
“While the vast majority of people on TikTok are over 18, and one of our fastest growing demographics is people over 35, we spent a lot of time adopting measures to protect teenagers,” said Chew. “Many of those measures are firsts for the social media industry. We forbid direct messaging for anyone under 16, and we have a 60-minute watch time by default for those under 18. … I would also like to talk about international security concerns that you have raised, that we take very, very seriously.”
Chew said he wanted to clear up some “misconceptions” about ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. “ByteDance is not owned, or controlled by the Chinese government,” he stressed. “It’s a private company. 60 percent of the company is owned by global institutional investors, twenty percent is owned by the founder, and twenty percent is owned by employees around the world. ByteDance has five board members, three of them are American. Now, TikTok itself is not available in mainland China. We’re headquartered in Los Angeles and in Singapore.”
He said he didn’t want to “dismiss or trivialize” any concerns about Chinese access to U.S. user data, but over the past two years the company has worked to build a “firewall” the protects users from “unauthorized foreign access” of data. By default, Chew said, TikTok data is stored in Oracle’s servers in Texas. Members of Congress asked him straight-up if China’s government has access to Americans’ data, and he said, “They have never asked us, I have seen no evidence of this happening.”