TikTok CEO testifies before Congress for the first time

TikTok CEO Shou Chew made his first appearance before Congress on Thursday and was immediately hit by intense criticism from lawmakers, including calls for the app to be banned.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, opened Thursday’s hearing by tearing into TikTok, and telling Shou: “Your platform should be banned.”

“I expect today you’ll say anything to avoid this outcome,” she continued. “We aren’t buying it. In fact, when you celebrate the 150 million American users on TikTok, it emphasizes the urgency for Congress to act. That is 150 million Americans that the [Chinese Communist Party] can collect sensitive information on.”

In his opening remarks, Chew attempted to stress TikTok’s independence from China and played up its US ties. “TikTok itself is not available in mainland China, we’re headquarterd in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the U.S. today,” he said.

“Still, we have heard important concerns about the potential for unwanted foreign access to US data and potential manipulation of the TikTok US ecosystem,” Chew said. “Our approach has never been to dismiss or trivialize any of these concerns. We have addressed them with real action.

Chew’s moment in the hot seat comes as some lawmakers are renewing calls for the app to be banned in the United States due to perceived national security concerns because of its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. TikTok acknowledged to CNN last week that federal officials are demanding the app’s Chinese owners sell their stake in the social media platform, or risk facing a US ban of the app. A number of countries, including the US, have already instituted a ban of the app on government devices due to the security concerns.

TikTok doesn’t operate in China. But since the Chinese government enjoys significant leverage over businesses under its jurisdiction, the theory goes that ByteDance, and thus indirectly, TikTok, could be forced to cooperate with a broad range of security activities, including possibly the transfer of TikTok data.

With his appearance, Chew may hope to reassure Americans and temper the heated rhetoric in Washington about the app – but the first two hours of the hearing showed just how challenging a task that might be.

Washington has already made up its mind about TikTok

Much of Chew’s attempts to stress that his company is not an arm of the Chinese government appeared to fall on deaf ears. Numerous members of Congress interrupted the chief executive’s testimony to say they simply don’t believe him.

“To the American people watching today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon by the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see and exploit for future generations,” said Rep. McMorris Rodgers.

In an exchange with Rep. Anna Eshoo, Chew talked up TikTok’s ongoing efforts to protect US user data and said he has “seen no evidence that the Chinese government has access to that data; they have never asked us, we have not provided it.”

“I find that actually preposterous,” Eshoo fired back.

“I have looked in — and I have seen no evidence of this happening,” Chew responded. “Our commitment is to move their data into the United States, to be stored on American soil by an American company, overseen by American personnel. So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company, asking for data.”

“I don’t believe that TikTok — that you have said or done anything to convince us,” Eshoo said.

Perhaps no exchange sums up Thursday’s hearing like a moment following Rep. Kat Cammack’s lengthy critique of TikTok’s content moderation and links to China.

“Can I respond, Chair?” Chew asked McMorris Rodgers after Cammack’s time was up.

McMorris Rodgers considered Chew for a brief moment.

“No. We’re going to move on,” she said.

TikTok continues to emphasize that its practices are no different than US tech giants

As lawmakers doubled down on their questions about TikTok’s data collection practices, Chew also emphasized that the data TikTok collects is data “that’s frequently collected by many other companies in our industry.”

“We are committed to be very transparent with our users about what we collect,” Chew said. “I don’t believe what we collect is more than most players in the industry.”

Independent researchers have backed Chew’s assertions. In 2020, The Washington Post worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than your typical mainstream social network. The following year, Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, performed another technical analysis that reached similar conclusions.

Still, even if TikTok collects about the same amount of information as Facebook or Twitter, that’s still quite a lot of data, including information about the videos you watch, comments you write, private messages you send, and — if you agree to grant this level of access — your exact geolocation and contact lists.

TikTok’s impact on children a key point of focus

While national security was expected to be the primary focus of the hearing, multiple lawmakers also highlighted concerns about TikTok’s impact on children.

Democratic ranking member of the committee Rep. Frank Pallone, for example, said Thursday: “Research has found that TikTok’s algorithms recommend videos to teens that create and exacerbate feelings of emotional distress, including videos promoting suicide, self-harm and eating disorders.”

Rep. Bob Latta, a Republican from Ohio, accused TikTok of promoting a video on the so-called “blackout challenge” or choking challenge to the feed of a 10-year-old girl from Pennsylvania, who later died after trying to mimic the challenge in the video.

Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida also said there is a lack of adequate content moderation, which leaves room for kids to be exposed to content that promotes self harm.

“Your technology is literally leading to death,” Bilirakis said to TikTok CEO Shou Chew.

Citing examples of harmful content served to children, he said, “it is unacceptable, sir, that even after knowing all these dangers, you still claim that TikTok is something grand to behold.”

TikTok, for its parts, has launched a number of features in recent months to provide additional safeguards for younger users, including setting a new 60-minute default for daily time limit for those under the age of 18. Even that feature, however, was criticized by lawmakers as being too easy for teens to bypass.

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