On Tuesday, March 21st, the C.E.O. of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, made a surprise appearance in a video posted to the company’s official account. A forty-year-old Singaporean who joined ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, in 2021, Chew was scheduled to appear two days later at a hearing on TikTok before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. But his tone in the video was jaunty and almost spitefully cheerful. Wearing a hoodie and sitting in a glassy penthouse overlooking Washington, D.C., he looked a little like a TikTok influencer himself: glowing skin, perfectly lit, gazing straight into the camera. He boasted that a hundred and fifty million Americans were now using TikTok, then issued a warning to users about politicians’ mounting calls to ban the platform over security concerns around its ties to the Chinese government. “This could take TikTok away from all a hundred and fifty million of you,” Chew said. The video accumulated more than a million likes and thousands of righteous comments. “I trust him more than Zuckerberg,” one user wrote.
On Thursday, during five hours of questioning by the House Committee, Chew appeared considerably less in control. Now dressed in a stylish blue suit, and sitting alone at a long table before the assembled lawmakers, he had difficulty navigating the implacable flow of questioning, and often had his mike cut before he could respond in full. As committee members interrogated Chew about TikTok’s algorithmic feed, the Chinese government’s access to its user data, and its policies governing young users, Chew often stalled, repeated a set of scripted talking points, and avoided giving direct answers. He maintained composure throughout, yet his boilerplate commentary gave the impression that his bosses at ByteDance had forbidden him from saying anything of much substance.
At times, his responses bordered on unintentionally comedic. When the Republican congressman Neal Dunn, of Florida, asked if the Chinese Communist Party had compelled ByteDance to spy on American journalists, as Forbes reported last year, Chew at first said no, and then, when the question was repeated, “I don’t think ‘spying’ is the right way to describe it.” His constant refrain, particularly regarding details of the platform’s technology, was a punting “I’ll have to get back to you on that.”
Though Chew is not a Chinese citizen—he was born and raised in Singapore and attended Harvard Business School, where he met his Taiwanese-American wife and landed an internship at Facebook—the Republican committee members treated him as a suitable target for their hawkish anti-China posturing. “TikTok is a weapon for the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you,” the chair of the committee, Cathy Rodgers, a Republican from Washington State, said in her opening remarks, adding plainly, “Your platform should be banned.” The Ohio Republican Bob Latta compared Chew’s pre-hearing TikTok video to Chinese propaganda. Chew denied that it got any artificial promotion through the platform’s secret internal function called “heating.” “I went viral organically,” he said, breaking his straight-faced affect and sounding just a little pleased with himself.
The committee’s questions encompassed both specific critiques of TikTok and more ambient complaints about social media in general, including some fumbling questions about how digital technology works in the first place. (Representative Richard Hudson, a fifty-one-year-old Republican from North Carolina, asked if TikTok used home Wi-Fi networks; the answer was yes, like everything else on the Internet.) The proceedings, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearings in 2018 around the Cambridge Analytica scandal, provided a rare occasion for bipartisan unity. Whether over antagonism to China, antagonism to Big Tech’s for-profit digital surveillance, or ostentatious concern for the health of American children who have their eyes glued to their screens, any politician can find some reason to be angry at TikTok. Representative John Sarbanes, a Democrat from Maryland, described teen-agers as “drowning” in algorithms. Representative Earl Carter, a Republican from Georgia, noting that “two-thirds of all the youths in our country are on your app,” for an average of ninety-five minutes a day, said, “Research has shown that TikTok is the most addictive platform out there.”
“Addictive algorithms” came up repeatedly during questioning. Representative Jay Obernolte, a Republican from California who in 1990 founded a video-game studio, was more eloquent about technology than some of his colleagues. Algorithms “gather user data then use powerful A.I. tools to make eerily accurate predictions of human behavior, then manipulate that behavior,” he said. He was right, but the description could apply equally to the algorithmic feeds used by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube, because data gathering has been left relatively unregulated in the U.S.—owing to the failure of Congress to pass new online-privacy laws, as the European Union has already done. As Chew pointed out, “We do not collect any more data than any other companies out there.”
At the same time, Chew struggled to convince committee members that TikTok data could be protected from Chinese influence. TikTok has offices around the world, but it does not function in China itself, where there is a counterpart app called Douyin. Both are owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company that counts Chinese Communist Party members as board members and counts the Chinese government as a stakeholder. Chew repeatedly declined to say whether TikTok was a Chinese company or whether many of its executives were C.C.P. members. Nor did he make a convincing case that the platform maintains independence from ByteDance, with which it currently shares source code, customer data, and legal representation. TikTok is a “global collaborative effort,” Chew said, including the contributions of Chinese engineers. His main retort to questions regarding C.C.P. influence over ByteDance or TikTok was not to deny the claim but to highlight Project Texas, an endeavor that TikTok has begun, at a cost of some one and a half billion dollars, to move all data from American users to U.S. soil, overseen independently by the American company Oracle. (Oracle now owns a stake in TikTok itself.) The project didn’t seem to reassure anyone that the company could guarantee freedom from Chinese interference.
No question during the hearing betrayed much positive sentiment toward TikTok. Representative Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, did note that the platform was a home for “Black creators,” but then went on to say that TikTok structurally failed to provide them “attribution and compensation.” Chew offered platitudes about how the platform enables self-expression and educational experiences, including a STEM-only content channel launched earlier this month, conveniently timed ahead of the hearing to demonstrate TikTok’s positive social contribution. But the C.E.O. said little else to defend TikTok’s value. The platform’s users might have been able to make a better case. In Newsweek, the TikTok creator Abbie Richards recently argued for the platform as a forum for free speech and activism for digital communities. Banning the app would mean that “channels of communication that have been steadily established over the last half of this decade will cease to exist, leaving some of the most marginalized in our country suddenly in the dark,” she wrote.
The Biden Administration is reportedly demanding that ByteDance sell TikTok to an American company, a move that the Chinese government said it would block. If such a divestiture were to occur, it would assuage security concerns while preserving the app as a digital forum and maintaining the livelihoods of TikTok creators and small businesses who use the feed for marketing. But it would not solve most of the complaints of the committee members, who often seemed to cast TikTok as a scapegoat for the sins of all social media. Chew’s repeated protestations that TikTok functions just like any other social network were, to an extent, correct. Banning it would not eliminate addictive algorithmic feeds, ameliorate data surveillance, prevent dangerous “challenge” memes from harming children, or solve the problem of rampant disinformation—any more than banning McDonald’s would fix junk food. Those issues would just intensify on other platforms as TikTok users migrate. After all, other platforms have already scrambled to adopt many of TikTok’s innovations for themselves.
Chew’s narrow responses failed to convey TikTok’s strengths as a social network or, more simply, how it has earned the intense loyalty of millions of American users. Their devotion was on display, for instance, in the many TikTok videos that reacted to the hearing almost in real time. One video highlighting a particularly heated line of questioning from Representative Carter was titled “They’ll do anything To make them look bad” and earned more than six hundred thousand likes. A comment on the video summarized the mood on the platform: “can’t believe we pay these people to represent us.” ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
