TikTok CEO will testify before US Congress to fight against app ban

This will be Chew’s first appearance before a U.S. committee, who, in a strongly worded statement, said, “Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country.”

Chew met with a number of committee members to identify the key pain points, namely: minor safety, data privacy, and security, real-world harms from online activities, and the risk of foreign content manipulation. Ahead of the hearing, he enlisted four commitments to the U.S. Congressional committee and the public at large:

• We will keep safety—particularly for teenagers—a top priority for us;

• We will firewall-protected U.S. user data from unauthorized foreign access;

• TikTok will remain a platform for free expression and will not be manipulated by any government;

• We will be transparent and give access to third-party independent monitors, to remain accountable for our commitments.

Chew is set to be grilled by the committee members, as was TikTok’s COO Vanessa Pappas at a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing last year. As per a report, the members were frustrated by her insistence that ByteDance was not a Chinese company and pressed her about TikTok’s China-based employees.

A lot is resting on how Chew deals with the committee’s questions and if he’s able to convince the members of any wrongdoings by TikTok.

TikTok under pressure

Trouble for the company is not just brewing in the U.S. but the world over. TikTok has officially been banned in the phones of federal employees of nations like the U.S., the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Belgium, the European Union, Canada, and Taiwan.

TikTok has been continuously refuting allegations of Chinese spying and sharing private data of users as baseless and based on ‘fundamental misconceptions.’

A recent Forbes report said that troves of personal data of Indian citizens still lie with the app and remain accessible to company employees. This is worrisome as the Chinese app was banned by the Indian government three years ago, in June 2020, due to geopolitical tensions between the neighboring countries.