TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew‘s Hearing: A Debate That Cannot Be Clarified

After three years, TikTok is once again at a crossroads: "SELL" or "BAN"?

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew attended a public hearing for the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce for the first time.

Shou Zi Chew is the CEO of TikTok, he was born and raised in Singapore. After completing his military service — mandatory for most male Singaporeans — he left to study economics at University College London (UCL), a top British university, graduating in 2006 and working at investment bank Goldman Sachs for two years.

He moved to the United States to get his master’s degree at Harvard Business School and met his wife Vivian Kao. Now, He is a husband, and father, currently residing in Singapore with his wife and two children.

The most concerning questions during the hearing:

Data Storage

For the past two years, we've been building what amounts to a firewall to protect our users' data from unauthorized foreign access. Most importantly, U.S. data is stored on U.S. soil by a U.S. company under U.S. supervision, which we call the "Texas Project," where Oracle is headquartered. Today TikTok's U.S. data is stored on $Oracle(ORCL)$ servers by default, and only vetted personnel in the new company, TikTok Data Security, will have access to it.

When that's done, all data will be protected and U.S. data will be protected under U.S. law and under the control of U.S.-led security, which will allay the concerns some of you have shared with me that Tiktok user data is subject to Chinese law. And the steps we're taking now go further than any other company in the industry. We're also providing unprecedented transparency and security for the TikTok app and recommendation engine source code.

Teen Protection

While security was expected to be the primary focus of the hearing, multiple lawmakers also highlighted concerns about TikTok’s impact on children.

TikTok, for its parts, has launched a number of features in recent months to provide additional safeguards for younger users, including setting a new 60-minute default for daily time limit for those under the age of 18.

User Privacy

Concerns about TikTok's potential security, privacy content manipulation, are really not unique to TikTok, other companies have these same issues. We believe that what is really needed are clear, transparent rules that apply broadly to all technology companies, and that TikTok ownership is not central to addressing these concerns.

$Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ 's CEO Zuckerberg was once in this position and faced the same problem.

Will Tik Tok be banned or not?

Since 2000, CFIUS has been investigating TikTok and has proposed a mutually acceptable draft: the Texas Project, which would allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States while ensuring adequate data protection and third-party oversight.

TikTok's users are primarily young people, and young voter turnout has increased dramatically in the 2018, 2020, and 2022 elections. And TikTok is an important platform to reach these young voters. So choosing to block TikTok as the election cycle approaches is not politically wise.

Even Biden's Commerce Secretary Raimondo admitted in an interview with Bloomberg, "My political sensibilities tell me that this move will cost us all voters under the age of 35, forever."

Tik Tok's act

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, who has always kept a low profile, has done something high-profile since arriving in Washington this week: he has announced in a video that he has arrived in Washington and that the number of monthly active TikTok users has soared from 100 million in August 2020 to 150 million.

The video is not only a warm-up for his hearing drama this week, but also tells Congress: to ban TikTok is to ban 150 million American users.

Are you a TikTok user? 

Would you support or oppose the government banning TikTok?