The CEO of TikTok faced a grilling Thursday from a US congressional committee in a rare public appearance where he made his own case for why the hugely popular video-sharing app shouldn't be banned.
Shou Zi Chew's testimony came at a crucial time for the company, which has acquired 150 million American users but is under increasing pressure from US officials.
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have been swept up in a wider geopolitical battle between Beijing and Washington over trade and technology.
“Mr Chew, you are here because the American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security,” Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, said in her opening statement. "TikTok has repeatedly chosen a path for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation.”
Chew, a 40-year-old Singapore native, told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that TikTok prioritises the safety of its young users and denied allegations that the app is a national security risk.
He reiterated the company's plan to protect US user data by storing all such information on servers maintained and owned by the server giant Oracle.
“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” Chew said.
On Wednesday, the company sent dozens of popular TikTokers to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers to preserve the platform.
It has also been putting up ads all over Washington that tout promises of securing users' data and privacy and creating a safe platform for its young users.
TikTok has been dogged by claims that its Chinese ownership means user data could end up in the hands of the Chinese government or that it could be used to promote narratives favourable to the country's Communist leaders.
In a rare, bipartisan effort to reign in the power and influence of a major social media platform, Republican and Democratic lawmakers pressed Chew on a host of topics, ranging from TikTok's content moderation practices, how the company plans to secure American data from Beijing, and that it admits spying on journalists.
In 2019, the Guardian had reported TikTok was instructing its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square and other images unfavourable to the Chinese government. The platform says it has since changed its moderation practices.
ByteDance admitted in December that it fired four employees last summer who accessed data on two journalists, as well as other people connected to them, while attempting to track down the source of a leaked report about the company.
For its part, TikTok has been trying to distance itself from its Chinese origins, saying that 60 per cent of its parent company ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group.
ByteDance was founded by Chinese entrepreneurs in Beijing in 2012.
Responding to a Wall Street Journal report, China said it would oppose any US attempts to force ByteDance to sell the app. But Chew pushed back against the idea that TikTok's ownership was an issue in itself.
“Trust is about actions we take. We have to earn that trust with decisions we make for our company and our products and potential security, privacy content, manipulation concerns raised about TikTok are really not unique to us,” Chew said. "Ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns.”
A US ban on an app would be unprecedented and it's unclear how the government would enforce it.
Experts say officials could try to force Apple and Google to remove TikTok from their app stores, preventing new users from downloading it as well as preventing existing users from updating it, ultimately rendering it useless.
“The US could also block access to TikTok's infrastructure and data, seize its domain names or force internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon to filter TikTok data traffic,” said Ahmed Ghappour, a criminal law and computer security expert who teaches at Boston University School of Law.
“But a tech-savvy user could still get around restrictions by using a virtual private network to make it appear the user is in another country where it's not blocked,” he said.
To avoid a ban, TikTok has been trying to sell officials on a $1.5 billion plan called Project Texas, which routes all US user data to domestic servers owned and maintained by software giant Oracle.
Under the project, access to US data is managed by US employees through a separate entity called TikTok US Data Security, which employs 1,500 people, is run independently of ByteDance and would be monitored by outside observers.
“As of October, all new US user data was being stored inside the country. The company started deleting all historic US user data from non-Oracle servers this month, in a process expected to be completed later this year,” Chew said.
Generally, researchers have said TikTok behaves like other social media companies when it comes to data collection. In an analysis released in 2021, the University of Toronto's nonprofit Citizen Lab found TikTok and Facebook collect similar amounts of user data valuable for advertisers.
To block such tracking, Congress, the White House, US armed forces and more than half of US states have banned the use of the app from official devices.
But wiping away all the data tracking associated with the platform might prove to be difficult.
In a report released this month, the Cybersecurity company Feroot said so-called tracking pixels from ByteDance, which collect user information, were found on 30 US state websites, including somewhere the app has been banned for official use.
Other countries including Denmark, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand, along with the European Union, have already banned TikTok from devices issued to government employees.
David Kennedy, a former government intelligence officer who runs the cybersecurity company TrustedSec, agrees with restricting TikTok access on government-issued phones because they might contain sensitive information. “A nationwide ban, however, might be too extreme,” he said. He also wondered where it might lead.
“We have Tesla in China, we have Microsoft in China, we have Apple in China. Are they going to start banning us now?" Kennedy said. It could escalate very quickly.
