TikTok’s CEO plans to tell Congress that the video-sharing app is dedicated to person protection, knowledge coverage and safety, and holding the platform loose from Chinese govt affect.
Shou Zi Chew is due to solution questions Thursday from U.S. lawmakers involved concerning the social media platform’s results on its younger person base and imaginable nationwide safety dangers posed through the preferred app, which was once based through Chinese marketers.
Chew is sticking to a well-known script as he urges officers against pursuing an all-out ban on TikTok or for the corporate to be offered off to new house owners.
TikTok’s efforts to be sure that the protection of its customers’ knowledge, together with a $1.5 billion venture to retailer the information on Oracle servers within the U.S. and make allowance outdoor displays to check out its supply code, pass “above and beyond” what any of its competitors are doing, in accordance to Chew’s ready remarks launched forward of his look ahead of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
“No other social media company, or entertainment platform like TikTok, provides this level of access and transparency,” he mentioned.
Chew driven again against fears that TikTok may just turn out to be a device of China’s ruling Communist Party as a result of its mum or dad corporate, ByteDance, is primarily based in Beijing.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew mentioned.
He distanced TikTok from its Chinese roots and denied the “inaccurate” trust that TikTok’s company construction makes it “beholden to the Chinese govt.” ByteDance has evolved into a privately held “global enterprise,” Chew said, with 60% owned by big institutional investors, 20% owned by the Chinese entrepreneurs who founded it and the rest by employees.
It’s “emphatically untrue” that TikTok sends data on its American users to Beijing, he said.
“TikTok hasn’t ever shared, or won a request to proportion, U.S. person knowledge with the Chinese govt,” Chew said. “Nor would TikTok honor such a request if one were ever made.”
TikTok has come under fire in the U.S., Europe and Asia-Pacific, where a growing number of governments have banned the app from devices used for official business over worries it poses risks to cybersecurity and data privacy or could be used to push pro-Beijing narratives and misinformation.
Chew, a 40-year-old Singaporean who was appointed CEO in 2021, said in a TikTok video this week that the congressional hearing comes at a “pivotal moment” for the company, which now has 150 million American users.
U.S. regulators have reportedly threatened to ban TikTok unless the Chinese owners sell their stake. Lawmakers have introduced measures that would expand the Biden administration’s authority to enact a national ban and called for “structural restrictions” between TikTok’s American operations and ByteDance, including potentially separating the companies.
Chew said TikTok’s data security project, dubbed Project Texas, is the right answer, not a ban or a sale of the company.
The company started deleting the historical protected data of U.S. users from non-Oracle servers this month, Chew said. When that process is completed later this year, all U.S. data will be protected by American law and controlled by a U.S.-led security team.
“Under this structure, there is no way for the Chinese government to access it or compel access to it,” he said.
He mentioned a TikTok ban would harm the U.S. financial system and small American companies that use the app to promote their merchandise, whilst decreasing festival in an “increasingly concentrated market.” He added {that a} sale “would not impose any new restrictions on data flows or access.”
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