- The CEO of TikTok testifies in the United States Congress.
- It tries to convince lawmakers (especially Republicans) that TikTok doesn’t let China use its users’ data.
- The dispute began years ago, when Donald Trump was in the White House.
The CEO of TikTok is going to testify this Thursday, March 23, at a hearing of the United States Congress. Shou Zi Chew was summoned to answer questions from lawmakers about the security of the Chinese-sourced platform.
Chew is a former soldier in the Singapore Army who studied at Harvard and was a banker, among other entities, at Goldman Sachs.
The TikTok CEO statement It will materialize before the Committee on Commerce and Energy of the House of Representatives, whose members point out that Beijing would be influencing the content of the short video application and, potentially, illegally collecting data from US users.
TikTok has already denied Chinese government interference and has previously committed to block any data leaks from US users to foreign countries.
He has also expressed himself in favor of working to guarantee a “safe environment” for young users, another of the concerns of legislators and the White House.
Congress is skeptical that TikTok could prevent the Chinese government from having influence over the app as long as it is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance.
They put pressure on the CEO of TikTok
The news last week was that Joe Biden demanded that the Chinese owners of TikTok shares sell them.
All this has generated that Chew’s testimony this Thursday has an unusual relevance in this class of statements.
The company hopes it can persuade lawmakers that the plan to invest $1.5 billion to protect user data will work and that a forced sale won’t be necessary.
This week, within hours of testifying in Washington, Chew posted a video on Tik Tok saying the app has more than 150 million monthly active users based in the US. “Nearly half of Americans use TikTok,” the CEO stated.
Although he was not explicit in the video about threatening the United States, Chew said: “Some politicians talk about banning TikTok; but be careful, that would mean taking TikTok away from 150 million of you ”.
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