Tiktok is fighting against his ban in the USA
Tiktok boss Chew wants to prevent a US ban on the Chinese video platform. His trump card: He doesn’t come from China.
Shou Zi Chew, the boss of Tiktok, has to testify before the US Congress in Washington in March. MPs accuse him of the video platform being controlled by Beijing.
Photo: AFP
Shou Zi Chew has already paid his respects to the European Commission. When he appeared in Brussels in December, he showed understanding for the concerns of the EU, but in the end he was not very binding. He won’t get off that easily in the US Congress. Politicians from both parties see Tiktok not only as a tool of the Chinese Communist Party. They want to set an example.
The slogan is: show toughness against China. What the USA has so far failed to do with Facebook, Whatsapp and YouTube, namely a watertight defense against the misuse of user data, is now to be implemented at Tiktok. Even if that should lead to a total ban on the video platform.
Tiktok sees itself as a political victim
Shou Zi Chew has agreed to testify before the House Energy and Trade Commission in March. It’s the first hearing by a Tiktok CEO, which is surprising as the company has been under pressure for four years. Ex-President Donald Trump wanted to take Tiktok out of circulation, but was unable to get his way in Congress, whereupon the Biden administration shifted gears and wanted to commit Tiktok to separating from the Chinese parent company Bytedance and establishing a platform under US law to become.
But in January the wind changed again. The Republicans, with their slim majority in the House of Representatives, are opposed to a deal like the one Biden wants and are looking for a confrontation. Republican Commission President Cathy McMorris Rodgers set the tone for the hearing with Chew. «Tiktok allowed the Chinese Communist Party knowingly exploiting Americans’ user data. We want to know how this affects data security and what Tiktok is doing to protect our children from harmful influences.” A coalition of Republicans and individual Democrats has already introduced legislation banning the platform.
Tiktok tried to counter. Neither the Communist Party nor Bytedance controlled Tiktok, but Chew recently admitted he is also accountable to Bytedance’s board of directors. Like other tech companies, Bytedance has an internal committee of the Communist Party. And when it comes to hiring employees, party members are given preference. The video platform is popular in the United States: it is visited by more than 100 million users, mostly young people. There are 1.7 billion worldwide.
“Tiktok put Chew on top because he’s not Chinese.”
What that means for the US, Chew will have to explain before Congress. The fact that Tiktok accuses Congress of favoring social media from the West should also give cause for concern. “Parliamentarians should be concerned with solving the problems holistically, rather than pretending that banning a single platform will alleviate their concerns and make Americans safer.”
The 40-year-old Tiktok boss spent his apprenticeship years in the United States. He studied at the renowned Harvard University. He first did an internship at Facebook before relocating to Beijing, where he worked as chief financial officer for tech giant Xiaomi and helped take the company public. His relationship with Bytedance goes back ten years. At that time he led a team of investors who invested in the fledgling company. He kept in touch with Bytedance, was appointed chief financial officer in 2021 and made head of Tiktok just two months later.
Does the data deal stand?
This unusually fast castling can be explained by Chew’s origins. He is a citizen of the city-state of Singapore. Tiktok likes to put this origin, i.e. not being Chinese, in the foreground. The strategy is clear to Ivan Kanapathy, former director of the China desk on the White House National Security Council. “Tiktok put him on top because he’s not Chinese and because Singapore is a bridge between the two worlds, between East and West.” However, the China expert does not believe that this will impress Congress. “It won’t make any difference because Chew is ultimately only accountable to Bytedance. Nothing can change that fact,” says Kanapathy.
This dependency makes a deal with the government more difficult and gives those who want to shut down Tiktok a boost. The platform has been running all data traffic in the USA via the servers of the US software company Oracle since last summer; this is to monitor the algorithms and ensure that the backup data is deleted. However, whether this cooperation will last is more questionable than ever, because it would make it impossible for the Chinese government to ever intervene in the Tiktok app in the USA. However, as long as Bytedance is in control, a deal cannot be trusted, says Jacob Hellberg, technology advisor at Stanford University. “It is simply impossible for a company to comply with American and Chinese law at the same time.”
Found a mistake?Report now.