Now, as TikTok’s leader government, he’s transform the face of what some Washington lawmakers have claimed, with out proof, is a shadowy Chinese spying and propaganda mechanical device. When he’s taking the stand for his first congressional listening to Thursday, he’s prone to face the grilling of a lifetime from lawmakers who argue that the app, now with 150 million U.S. customers, can’t be depended on and should be banned or bought.
Chew, a 40-year-old local of Singapore, has labored to counter American suspicions with onerous good judgment, telling participants of Congress in one-on-one conferences that his corporate is unaffiliated with the Chinese govt and is dedicated to construction a “sunny corner of the internet” for colourful movies and artistic speech.
“I don’t want to go in and question anybody’s intentions. That’s not my job,” he stated in an interview remaining month on the corporate’s WePaintings suite close to Capitol Hill.
“We hear general unrelated fears, analogies, associations that don’t make sense,” he added, “and for those, I think the right approach is to make sure that we reach out to understand: Is there anything more specific you’re talking about? And how do we address that?”
His allure offensive has run up in opposition to a closely polarized and unusually bipartisan resistance in Washington, the place tensions with the Chinese govt — and broader anxieties about social media and American youngsters — have made TikTok into a political punching bag.
“The temperature is so high right now,” stated Jim Lewis, director of the strategic applied sciences program on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington assume tank. “I would not choose this week to go to the Hill unless you have a death wish.”
Chew stated he’s operating to conquer the “trust deficit” that lawmakers have with no longer simply TikTok however any corporate coming from China, the sector’s second-deepest wellspring of tech innovation. His congressional testimony it is going to be broadly watched by means of TikTok’s thousands and thousands of American enthusiasts, its hundreds of U.S. workers and its traders around the West, who fear that a U.S. govt campaign may puncture its multibillion-dollar empire.
But even a persuasive efficiency by means of Chew might not be sufficient. Biden management officers, like Trump appointees ahead of them, have argued that TikTok will have to be bought to a U.S. purchaser to get to the bottom of nationwide safety considerations about how the app may funnel Americans’ knowledge to the Chinese govt or spice up Chinese propaganda — two fees for which the United States hasn’t ever supplied proof, and which TikTok’s leaders have argued are speculative and incorrect.
Chew’s testimony may lift uncomfortable questions on what occurs when American tech giants are not the dominant power at the back of what Americans see on-line. But it might additionally spotlight Washington’s rising pastime in the use of geopolitics to pick out winners and losers on the web — a subject with main penalties for the form of the longer term internet.
TikTok is also just the beginning. Of the Apple App Store’s 10 most-downloaded free apps within the United States, 4 are owned by means of Chinese corporations, 3 of which rank above TikTok: PDD Holdings’ buying groceries app Temu; the fast-fashion titan Shein; and some other ByteDance app, the video editor CapCut, which has greater than 200 million energetic customers international.
Jeffrey Towson, a former professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management who now works as a tech guide, stated Chew’s time at ByteDance coincides with China’s ascent at the world web, together with the advent of the primary Chinese-owned app Americans know and use.
“The idea that a Chinese social media company could break into the U.S. against Facebook and YouTube — that was a crazy idea back then, and now they’re all trying to do it, but ByteDance was the first,” Towson stated.
“TikTok is now the case study” for a way American lawmakers will reply, he added. “If you give them the power to ban social media companies, you think this is going to be the only time it happens?”
‘Like any good start-up story’
Before taking on TikTok in 2021, Chew adopted the type of top-tier company trajectory made imaginable by means of the globalization of recent tech.
He was once born and raised in Singapore, the island country in Southeast Asia that has transform a distinguished bridge for world trade between China and the West. He left to check economics at a London college, saying in an interview remaining 12 months that “the thing about growing up on a small island … is you get wanderlust at a very young age.”
He moved to the United States to get his grasp’s level at Harvard Business School, assembly his spouse in California all through a summer season internship whilst they have been each operating at start-ups, he told a Harvard alumni mag. Hers was once at a clean-energy corporate whilst his was once at Facebook, the then-ascendant social community that has since transform TikTok’s sour enemy.
Chew labored as an funding analyst at Goldman Sachs ahead of becoming a member of the Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner’s project capital company, DST Global, recognized for its bets on main tech corporations, together with Facebook and Twitter. As a spouse there, Chew helped coordinate one of the vital earliest investments in ByteDance by means of construction relationships with its two younger founding engineers, Liang Rubo and Zhang Yiming. (Milner renounced his Russian citizenship remaining 12 months.)
“They recognized an opportunity to build a good product people wanted,” Chew stated at a DealBook convention past due remaining 12 months. “I had the chance to invest in them, we became friends, and slowly, like any good start-up story, the product grew bigger and bigger.”
Though recognized within the United States essentially for TikTok, ByteDance has through the years transform one of the vital international’s most respected device factories, feverishly rolling out greater than 100 apps throughout classes starting from office verbal exchange (Lark) to video video games (“Mobile Legends: Bang Bang”).
ByteDance’s first hit, the news app Toutiao, used a advice set of rules to personalize other people’s feeds in accordance with their tastes and behaviors; the similar concept would power TikTok to world stardom after it introduced in 2017.
The Beijing-based corporate now says it runs workplaces in just about 120 towns world wide, together with Austin, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. But its dimension and prominence have additionally landed it within the crosshairs of the Chinese state: In 2018, after ByteDance was once pressured to near a comedy app that regulators had deemed “vulgar and improper,” the founders stated in an apologetic public letter that they’d paintings to be sure that communist values have been “broadcast to strength.”
In 2021, ByteDance employed Chew as its leader monetary officer, pulling him from some other Chinese tech company, the smartphone large Xiaomi, the place he had helped lead an preliminary public providing and announce new traces of pc displays.
By the time of his hiring, the Trump management had already ordered the fast-growing app banned or bought to an American corporate, and the Chinese govt had spoke back by means of stating its era a strategic asset, blockading any imaginable sale.
Before the Trump implosion, ByteDance employed Kevin Mayer, a Disney government who had helped release its streaming community, as TikTok’s CEO, believing he’d lend a hand make bigger TikTok’s world footprint. But when Mayer resigned after 3 months, bringing up a “sharply changed” political setting, the corporate increased Chew into the function.
After years of claiming little about its negotiations with U.S. officers, TikTok has in fresh months moved to extra aggressively inform its facet of the tale, announcing it had for too lengthy ceded flooring to critics who have been slamming the corporate with baseless claims.
Top TikTok officers — in addition to ByteDance’s peak legal professional, the previous Microsoft government Erich Andersen — have performed in-depth briefings with newshounds, researchers and policymakers. The corporate has additionally hosted press occasions at a TikTok “transparency center” in Los Angeles, replete with museum-style reveals during which newshounds can evaluation how the app’s code and moderation methods paintings.
Chew and his bosses at ByteDance have driven the concept they aren’t so other from the tech marketers of Silicon Valley. ByteDance’s founders have recorded videos of them traveling their first Beijing condominium workplace, echoing the nostalgic mythmaking that executives at Apple and different tech corporations made preferred via visits to outdated San Francisco Bay Area dorm rooms and garages.
In a video from Washington posted Tuesday at the corporate’s TikTok account, Chew wore the cliche ensemble of American tech geeks — a blue hoodie and denims — and requested TikTokers to go away feedback about what they sought after their elected representatives to grasp concerning the app. One of the highest feedback stated, “You know something went wrong when the boss has to show up,” with a cry-laughing emoji.
Chew, a married father of 2 founded in Singapore, has spent a lot of the previous a number of weeks in Washington, operating to in my view meet with participants of Congress — together with the entire participants of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, ahead of which he’ll be attesting — to give an explanation for the corporate’s place.
The corporate were negotiating since 2019 with the Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States, a cross-agency crew referred to as CFIUS, on choices to divestiture that might fulfill U.S. nationwide safety considerations.
In August, TikTok introduced CFIUS a 90-page blueprint for a $1.5 billion restructuring plan that might give the U.S. govt improbable leverage over TikTok’s American operations and open its knowledge and algorithms to inspection by means of the American tech corporate Oracle. Chew has known as the plan, referred to as Project Texas, “a solution no other company is trying to pursue.”
But the Biden management, which has stated not anything publicly concerning the proposal, has in fresh weeks informed the corporate that it received’t accept mitigation efforts and needs ByteDance to unload its stake as a strategy to sever any ties between TikTok and its Chinese roots.
Though Project Texas would sequester a lot of TikTok’s U.S. operation in a new entity whose leaders can be handpicked by means of the government, the app nonetheless is dependent upon code and assets overseen by means of China-based managers and engineers. TikTok has stated it is going to push ahead on Project Texas regardless.
In the conferences, Chew has labored to offer technical main points of Project Texas and talked at duration concerning the corporate’s investments in youngsters’s protection efforts and content material moderation, in accordance to those who have attended. He has known as on lawmakers to push for industry-wide laws that might cling TikTok and its American opponents to the similar algorithm.
He has additionally suggested them to assume previous the counter-lobbying of TikTok’s competition, maximum significantly Facebook guardian corporate Meta, which The Washington Post first reported remaining 12 months had funded a national media and lobbying marketing campaign designed to painting its rival as a generational danger.
Chew stated he intends to inform lawmakers all through the listening to that the in large part lighthearted leisure app now has greater than 150 million per month energetic customers within the United States — a 50 p.c acquire within the remaining two years — and that a ban would stomp on their speech freedoms and undermine Americans’ cultural cachet world wide.
But he has additionally, with lend a hand from a high-level preparatory workforce inside of TikTok, labored to metal himself for committee participants’ responses, which most likely will come with an onslaught of tricky questions and moments designed to elicit viral sound bites.
During TikTok’s remaining congressional look, in September, the corporate’s leader running officer, a former YouTube government named V Pappas, was once pummeled by means of lawmakers, together with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who known as the corporate “a walking security nightmare.” Pappas stated in Los Angeles this month that one of the lawmakers’ grievance is pushed by means of “xenophobia.”
Chew has labored to be outwardly diplomatic and figuring out, telling The Post that some participants of Congress he met with in fresh weeks had “some misunderstandings” however that they nonetheless had “the right to ask questions.”
But others within the corporate have described the conferences with uncooked exasperation, announcing one of the most important lawmakers were stubbornly misinformed or trafficked in unsubstantiated theories that the corporate is an arm of China’s Communist Party.
Some, they stated, have been receptive to their concepts in personal however appeared all too glad to assault the corporate when showing in a while nationwide TV. Some lawmakers have informed The Post they left their conferences with Chew totally unconvinced: “I don’t think there’s anything they can say,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) stated remaining month.
Unlike in additional conventional company hearings, the corporate has needed to cross it on my own: Its few allies in Washington come with NetChoice, a tech {industry} crew of which it’s a member. Oracle executives have introduced briefings by means of request to a few lawmakers on how items of Project Texas would possibly paintings however have no longer spoken publicly in reinforce.
One of TikTok’s few vocal congressional supporters, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) — who has 158,000 followers on the app — stated Tuesday that he would cling a news convention with TikTok creators outdoor the Capitol at the day ahead of the listening to about how the ban would undermine their free-speech rights.
Under Chew, the corporate has unveiled a set of options this month designed to neutralize one of the maximum not unusual evaluations of the corporate.
It introduced new screen-time restrictions for kids, who will probably be restricted to an hour a day until a guardian or father or mother enters a particular bypass code — an echo of a identical coverage followed by means of Chinese regulators. It additionally began permitting customers to reset the types of movies doping up on their major “For You” feeds, serving to them extra at once form the advice set of rules that its critics have stated is prone to political meddling.
In conferences with Chew, lawmakers automatically argued that TikTok within the United States trafficked solely in viral nonsense whilst ByteDance’s China-only model of TikTok, known as Douyin, boosted movies devoted to training and enrichment. The corporate has steadily argued that this declare is baseless, for the reason that a fast seek of TikTok within the United States yields hours of tutorial movies, and has famous that China’s web makes use of paternalistic social laws and restrictions to form on-line content material in a method that might run counter to American values.
Earlier this month, on the other hand, TikTok introduced that it could upload tabs to its major feeds within the United States devoted to instructional movies about science, era, engineering and math.
Chew, who has stated he likes studying about theoretical physics, has stated the ones are the types of movies that pop up on his TikTok feed, along stand-up comedy jokes and movies about golfing.
The remark is in step with such a lot of what Chew has informed lawmakers: that the TikTok they may well be so frightened of, and that they’ll by no means have checked out, is way more risk free than they believe.
“I learn a lot of stuff,” he stated with a smile. “Not everybody has had the chance to use our platform, right?”
Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima contributed to this record.
rationalization
The Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner renounced his Russian citizenship remaining 12 months.
