TikTok CEO to Congress: ‘ByteDance isn't an agent of China’

TikTok CEO Shou Chew is preparing to inform lawmakers that there are various “misconceptions” concerning the app, and that banning it’s going to harm the USA financial system. He’s additionally planning to inform members of Congress that issues about guardian firm ByteDance, and its ties to China, are unfounded.

“Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance isn’t an agent of China or every other nation,” Chew says in written remarks launched by the Home Power and Commerce Committee forward of Thursday’s hearing on TikTok. The listening to, which can mark Chew’s first Congressional look, comes at a second when the stakes couldn’t be larger for the corporate.

US officers not too long ago advised the corporate that TikTok may very well be banned in the USA if ByteDance doesn’t divest itself from the corporate. And members of each events have supported payments that may empower President Joe Biden and others in his administration to ban the app.

A lot of Chew’s written testimony is much like arguments TikTok has been making for years. He particulars the app’s security options, notably these aimed toward teenagers, in addition to Project Texas, TikTok’s billion-dollar effort to lock down US customers’ information. “Earlier this month, we started the method of deleting historic protected U.S. person information saved in non-Oracle servers; we anticipate this course of to be accomplished later this yr,” Chew writes. “Beneath this construction, there is no such thing as a approach for the Chinese language authorities to entry it or compel entry to it.”

Chew’s written testimony additionally touches on revelations that 4 former ByteDance workers used TikTok to entry the info of US journalists. The incident, which additional fueled lawmakers’ issues about TikTok, has reportedly prompted a DoJ investigation into the corporate. “I condemn this misconduct within the strongest potential phrases,” Chew wrote, noting that the corporate is conducting an investigation with an out of doors legislation agency.

However most notable are Chew’s feedback about China. He says that allegations that TikTok is “beholden to the Chinese language authorities” are “emphatically unfaithful” and describes ByteDance as a “world enterprise” that was “based by Chinese language entrepreneurs.”

Regardless of these assurances, lawmakers are more likely to grill Chew in depth about TikTok’s ties to ByteDance and China, and whether or not the corporate could be trusted to guard US customers. At a earlier listening to, when lawmakers heard from TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, they have been pissed off by her insistence that ByteDance was not a Chinese language firm, and pressed her about TikTok’s China-based workers. How Chew solutions related questions might immediately have an effect on the TikTok’s future in the USA.

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