TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew is testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee today, where he will desperately attempt to present the app as a safe and massively popular “sunny corner of the internet” and not a surreptitious surveillance tool for the Chinese government. He wants them not to ban the nation’s most popular short-form video app.
Chew will be walking into the lion’s den, though. Lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle are expected to treat Chew like a punching bag and use the hearing as a vehicle to blurt out a bevy of tough-on-China blather and demand a national ban or forced sale of the app. Still, how lawmakers respond to Chew’s pitch during the hearing could set the precedent for the U.S. government deals not just with TikTok, but really any major Chinese brand trying to weave itself into the fabric of Americans’ daily lives. No pressure!
The CEO’s pitch: TikTok is safer than other apps, and Americans need it
The relatively reclusive CEO’s depiction of TikTok will rest on three core elements: product safety, popularity, and data security. On the first of those issues, Chew will try to juxtapose TikTok’s safety practice against the horrendous privacy histories of other major social media products like Facebook and Instagram. TikTok is acutely aware of its popularity among younger users and will highlight the numerous policies over the years aimed at limiting screen time for teens. Chew will point to some of those efforts like blocking users under the age of 16 from sending DMs and rolling out one-hour scrolling limits for users under 18, as a way to push back against lawmakers’ accusations that the app is harmful and even addictive to young users. At times Republican lawmakers have compared TikTok to “digital fentanyl,” or more recently as cocaine “disguised as candy.”
“We launch great products with a safety-by-design mentality, even if those features limit our monetisation opportunities,” Chew said during his opening statement remarks viewed by Gizmodo. “Many of these measures impose restrictions not shared by other platforms.”
What is TikTok’s CEO going to say to Congress?
Chew will amplify new internal user data to argue TikTok in the U.S, is simply too big to break up and that doing so could potentially decimate thousands of small businesses. The CEO will tell lawmakers the app has amassed 150 million monthly active users, higher than the 100 million figure reporters just two years ago. Those figures don’t account for users under the age of 13, meaning TikTok’s total estimated user base is even higher. In a TikTok video ahead of the hearing, Chew said around 5 million businesses use TikTok to reach their customers.
“Although some people may still think of TikTok as a dancing app for teenagers, the reality is that our platform and our community have become so much more for so many,” Chew said during his opening testimony.
That point was buttressed Wednesday evening by a group of around 30 Tikok continent creators who gathered outside the national’s capital protesting national beans and calling on lawmakers to “Keep TikTok.
“I use TikTok to share a love of my family and our journey through foster care and adoption, and through that I’ve been able to create a community of people from all over the world,” TikTok creator Jason Linton said during the rally, according to NBC News. “I’m asking our politicians: Don’t take away the community that we’ve built.”
Can China extract from TikTok?
Then there’s the Chinese government question, which is expected to dominate most of the hearing. Lawmakers and U.S. intelligence agencies have long claimed, without proof, that TikTok’s Chinese ownership means Communist officials could tap into the app and use it as a surveillance tool to work against U.S. interests. On this point, Chew will try to draw a front line in the sand.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” he’s expected to say.
To that end, Chew wil try to alleviate lawmakers’ concerns by speaking at length of the groups’ U.S. data routing plan called “Project Texas” which promises to silo its American operation into a subsidiary called TikTok US Data Security, whose leadership would require American government approval.
Chew faces an uphill battle. Lawmakers from both sides of the political aisle have racheted up calls for a national TikTok ban in recent weeks. The app is already banned on all federal devices in the U.S., and many other countries are following suit. The Biden administration, long silent on where it stood on TikTok, last week told its Chinese owners to spin off their shares of the platform or face a ban.
That legislative pressure, combined with a general public increasingly divided over a TikTok ban, makes this just about the worst possible moment for Chew to make his case to Congress.
“The temperature is so high right now,” Centre for Strategic and International Studies Director of Strategic Technologies Jim Lewis said in a recent interview with The Washington Post, “I would not choose this week to go to the Hill unless you have a death wish.”
Lawmakers’ minds seem already made up on TikTok
Chew, according to The Washington Post, has reportedly spent weeks meeting individually with each member of the Energy and Commerce committee to hear out their concerns and try to clear up, “misunderstandings.” Chew took over as TikTok CEO in 2021 after serving as chief executive of Chinese-owned Xaomi, where he oversaw the company’s 2018 IPO.
“We hear general unrelated fears, analogies, associations that don’t make sense,” Chew told the Post. “And for those, I think the right approach is to make sure that we reach out to understand.”
Unfortunately, those calls for reason appear futile. Many lawmakers in Congress, especially those phishing forward bills aiming to ban the app, appear to already have their minds made up and are unlikely to be persuaded by any argument Chew can muster.
“While I appreciate Mr. Chew’s willingness to answer questions before Congress, TikTok’s lack of transparency, repeated obfuscations and misstatements of fact have severely undermined the credibility of any statements by TikTok employees, including Mr. Chew,” Virginia Sen. Mark Warner said in a statement to Politico. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who has also introduced his own legislation calling for a national ban, said he doesn’t need any more information on the issue.
“I don’t think TikTok’s CEO will be keen to answer questions about the app’s data collection or its ties to the CCP,” he told Politico.