TikTok CEO chewed out by U.S. lawmakers looking to ban the app

Looking to cut off a possible bipartisan bill that would ban TikTok in the U.S., the CEO of the platform, Shou Zi Chew, spoke to lawmakers today. The executive did admit to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that some China-based employees working for TikTok parent ByteDance might still have access to data from U.S. users. However, that access will end when the company's Project Texas initiative begins.

But this hardly calmed the lawmakers who are concerned about a law in China that forces firms like Byte Dance to turn over personal information collected to the Chinese Communist  Party (CCP) for "national security" reasons. TikTok's CEO did deny that TikTok shares data with the CCP.

According to CNBC, when Rep. Bob Latta, (R-Ohio), asked Chew if any ByteDance employee in China could access U.S. data today, Chew answered, "After Project Texas is done, the answer is no. Today, there is still some data that we need to delete." That data is located inside servers in Singapore and Virginia. Once this data is deleted, China-based ByteDance employees will not have access to that information. TikTok currently has 150 million U.S. subscribers.

A TikTok spokesperson said today, "Since October of 2022, all new U.S. user data has been stored exclusively in the Oracle Cloud Environment, with protected data fully out of reach of any foreign government. That data is managed exclusively by U.S. Data Security—a TikTok subsidiary made up of Americans, led and located in America—whose sole focus is to protect U.S. national security interests by securing U.S. user data and preventing outside manipulation of our systems."

Lawmakers were also upset with certain content found on the short-form video app. For example, Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.) grilled Chew about the suicide of 16-year-old Chase Nasca, who died last year after allegedly viewing TikTok videos that promoted suicide. Nasca's parents attended the hearing and were in tears when Bilirakis played some of these videos. The parents have filed a wrongful death lawsuit against ByteDance. "Mr. Chew, your company destroyed their lives," Bilirakis said.

Rep. Earl Carter, (R-Ga.), asked Chew about TikTok challenges many of which are dangerous and life-threatening. One, the "Blackout Challenge," tries to get TikTok users to strangle themselves and several children have died. Lawsuits have been filed.

Rep. Carter asked TikTok's CEO, "Why is it that TikTok consistently fails to identify and moderate these kinds of harmful videos? Why is it that you can’t control this?" Chew responded by saying, "This is a real industry challenge and we’re working very hard." Carter replied, "We’re not talking about the industry. We’re talking about TikTok."

During the hearing, Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fl) played for attendees a TikTok video that showed an animated gun firing bullets targeting committee chair Rep. McMorris Rodgers (R-Wa). Cammack chastised Chew by saying, "Your own community guidelines state that you have a firm stance against enabling violence on or off TikTok. This video has been up for 41 days." Chew confirmed after a break that the video had been removed during the hearing.

Cammack also read into the record an internal ByteDance memo that told employees to "downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, downplay AI." Commick responded by saying, "You've said repeatedly that there is no threat, that this is a platform for entertainment and for fun. Why, if you had nothing to hide, would you need to downplay the association with ByteDance and China?"

The executive answered, "Congresswoman, I have not seen that memo." That led Cammack to say, "You cannot answer that question."

TikTok is still one of the most popular apps on iOS and Android. On the latter platform alone the app has been installed over 1 billion times.