(CNN) —In his first appearance before the US Congress on Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew answered questions from lawmakers who expressed deep skepticism about his company’s attempts to protect US user data and ease restrictions. concerns about its ties to China.
The hearing, which lasted more than five hours, began with calls by a lawmaker to ban the app in the United States and remained combative. It was a stark example of bipartisan pressure to kill the popular short-video app and the company’s uphill battle to improve relations with Washington.
Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, opened Thursday’s hearing by telling Shou: “Your platform should be banned.”
“I hope today he says anything to avoid this result,” he continued. “We don’t buy it. In fact, when you boast of the 150 million American users on TikTok, you emphasize the urgency for Congress to act. That’s 150 million Americans that the [Partido Comunista Chino] may collect sensitive information.”
Chew, who until recently kept a low profile compared to other CEOs in the technology world, used his testimony to underline TikTok’s independence from China and emphasize its ties to the United States. “TikTok itself is not available in mainland China, we are headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” he said in his keynote address.
“Still, we have heard significant concerns about potential unwanted foreign access to US data and potential manipulation of the US TikTok 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 dock comes as some lawmakers are renewing calls to have the app banned in the United States due to perceived national security concerns over its ties to China through its parent company, ByteDance. TikTok acknowledged to CNN last week that federal officials are requiring the app’s Chinese owners to sell their stake in the social media platform, or risk a US ban on the app. Several countries, including the US, have already banned the app on government devices for security reasons.
TikTok does not operate in China. But since the Chinese government enjoys significant influence over companies under its jurisdiction, the theory goes that ByteDance, and thus indirectly TikTok, could be forced to cooperate with a wide range of security activities, including possibly data transfer. from TikTok.
By his appearance, Chew may have hoped to reassure Americans and dampen the heated rhetoric in Washington over the application, but the hearing, which lasted for hours, demonstrated just how difficult that task can be.
“Shou came prepared to answer questions from Congress,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokeswoman for TikTok, told CNN in a statement after the hearing. “But unfortunately the day was dominated by political bombast that failed to acknowledge the real solutions that are already in place.”
Washington has already decided on TikTok
Much of Chew’s attempts to stress that his company is not an arm of the Chinese government seemed to fall on deaf ears. Numerous members of Congress interrupted the CEO’s testimony to say they simply don’t believe him.
“To the American people watching us today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see, and exploit future generations,” said Rep. McMorris.
In an exchange with Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, Chew discussed TikTok’s ongoing efforts to protect American user data, saying that he “hasn’t seen any proof that the Chinese government has access to that data; we’ve never been asked to.” , we have not provided them.”
“I find it really absurd,” Eshoo replied.
“I’ve investigated…and I haven’t seen any evidence of this happening,” Chew replied. “Our commitment is to move your data to the US, to be stored on US soil by a US company, supervised by US personnel. So the risk would be similar to any government going to a US company, asking for data.”
“I don’t think TikTok said or did anything to convince us,” Eshoo said.
Perhaps no exchange better summed up Thursday’s hearing as a moment after Rep. Kat Cammack’s long-running criticism of TikTok’s content moderation and its ties to China.
“May I answer, President?” Chew asked McMorris when Cammack finished his speech.
McMorris considered Chew’s request for a brief moment.
“No. We’re going to move on,” he said.
TikTok CEO stresses that his practices are no different from those of US tech giants
As lawmakers stepped up their questions about TikTok’s data collection practices, Chew also stressed that the data TikTok collects is data “that many other companies in our industry frequently collect.”
“We are committed to being very transparent with our users about what we collect,” Chew said. “I don’t think what we collect is more than most players in the industry.”
Independent researchers have backed up Chew’s claims. In 2020, The Washington Post collaborated with a privacy researcher to analyze TikTok and concluded that the app doesn’t appear to collect any more data than the typical mainstream social network. The following year, Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwanese researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, conducted another technical analysis that came to similar conclusions.
Still, even if TikTok collects about the same amount of information as Facebook or Twitter, it’s still a lot of data, including information about the videos you watch, the comments you write, the private messages you send, and if you agree to grant this level of access, your exact geolocation and your contact lists.
(On Thursday, Chew said that current versions of TikTok do not collect accurate GPS information from US users.)
The impact of TikTok on minors, a key point
Although national security was expected to be the main topic of the hearing, several lawmakers also raised concerns about TikTok’s impact on minors.
The ranking Democratic member of the commission, 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 that promote suicide, self-harm, and eating disorders.”
Rep. Bob Latta, Republican of Ohio, accused TikTok of promoting a so-called “blackout challenge” video on the feed of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl, who later died after trying to imitate the challenge. in the video.
Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida also said there is a lack of proper content moderation, leaving room for minors to be exposed to content that promotes self-harm.
“Their technology is literally leading to death,” Bilirakis told the TikTok CEO.
Citing examples of harmful content reaching minors, he said: “It is unacceptable, sir, that even after knowing all these dangers, you still claim that TikTok is a great thing to behold.”
TikTok, for its part, has rolled out a number of features in recent months to provide additional safeguards for younger users, including setting a new 60-minute default value for the daily time limit for those under 18. However, even that feature was criticized by lawmakers for being too easy for teens to circumvent.
Representative compares Chew to Zuckerberg
Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., criticized what he saw as indirect responses from Chew, comparing him to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who in his own testimony in the past has also frustrated some members of Congress.
“You have been one of the few people who have joined this commission,” Cárdenas told Chew. “He reminds me a lot of Mark Zuckerberg. When he came here, I said to my team, ‘He reminds me of Fred Astaire: good dancer with words.’ And you’re doing the same thing today. A lot of your responses are a bit hazy; they’re not yes or no”.
Zuckerberg testified before the same chamber committee for hours back in 2018 in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Although both Chew and Zuckerberg run major social media platforms, Zuckerberg was already a household name when he took on lawmakers in 2018. Chew, for his part, has largely stayed out of the spotlight since taking the helm of TikTok. in 2021.
To prepare for his arraignment this Thursday, CNN has learned that Chew has spent the past week in nearly daylong, multi-hour prep sessions. The TikTok staff have worked to fine-tune and polish Chew’s presentation during these sessions. They’ve played legislators with varying styles of questioning, peppering Chew with practice questions and scenarios to prepare him for hours of relentless questioning.
The federal government steps up its rhetoric
Outside the courtroom, federal officials appeared to ramp up their rhetoric about TikTok.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that TikTok had to be “killed one way or another,” but noted that “there are different ways to do it.” In an appearance before the Committee on Foreign Relations of the House of Representatives, Blinken said he did not know if it would be enough for TikTok to disassociate itself from its Chinese parent.
The senior US diplomat said he believes the app is a threat to US national security, but did not say outright that it should be banned. “Obviously we, the administration and others are aware of the challenge and are taking steps to meet it,” he said.
In a separate statement Thursday that did not address or name TikTok specifically, the US Treasury Department, the agency that chairs the Commission on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), warned that it “will not authorize no transaction unless it determines that there are no unresolved national security concerns.”
“Broadly speaking, some transactions may present data security risks, including access by a foreign individual or government to a large amount of sensitive Americans’ personal data, as well as access to intellectual property, code source or other potentially sensitive information,” a department spokesperson said. “CFIUS, on a case-by-case basis, will ensure the protection of national security, including to prevent misuse of data through espionage, tracking, and other means that threaten national security.”
For more than two years, CFIUS and TikTok have been negotiating over a potential deal that could address US security concerns and allow the app to continue operating in the country.
But in his testimony, Chew sought to assuage longstanding concerns about the app, calling fears of Chinese government access to TikTok user data “hypothetical.”
“I think a lot of the risks that are being pointed out are hypothetical and theoretical,” Chew said. “I have not seen any evidence. I am eagerly awaiting discussions where we can talk about evidence and then we can address the concerns that are being raised.”