Tiktok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced a Bippartisan grill on Thursday when he appeared before House Energy and Commerce Committee to respond to the concerns of legislators concerning the video sharing application, which has 150 million active users in the United States. The parent company based in China, the parent company based in China, Bytedance, is particularly worrying, and its alleged ties with the Chinese government.
“We do not trust that Tiktok will never adopt American values, values for freedom, human rights and innovation”, the president of the Cathy McMorris Rodgers, republican Washington committee, said in his declaration of opening. “Tiktok has repeatedly chosen the way for more control, more surveillance and more manipulation. Your platform must be prohibited.”
There is currently Three invoices to the congress which could assign American access to Tiktok; Two would legislate a pure and simple ban on the platform, while the other would give the government the power to prohibit all technologies which are considered a risk of national security. Biden administration would have demanded that Bytedance sell Tiktok, threatening A total prohibition of the application if the company based in China does not comply. Thursday, a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said that the government would oppose a forced sale.
During the five -hour hearing, the chewing born in Singapore, 40, stressed that there had never been any evidence that the Chinese government was accessing the data of Tiktok users. He said countries prohibited The application on government devices has done so on the basis of “hypothetical and theoretical risks”. Last month, The United States and Canada Orders issued prohibiting the use of Tiktok on mobile devices issued by the government.
“Let me say unequivocally: Byédance is not an agent in China or any other country,” said Chew written declaration.
However, legislators on both sides of the aisle expressed doubts about this assertion, and many members of the committee joked the Tiktok CEO for bipartite inspiration. “You have unified republicans and democrats and, if only for a day, we are in fact unified because we have serious concerns”, ” said Rep. August Pfluger, a Texas Republican.
Chew’s essential answer when questioned about data confidentiality Texas ProjectThe current platform operation to move information on its American users to servers based on the United States. Tiktok’s CEO said that no China-based employees would have access to the American user data once the project was finished, but the committee members wondered if this internal firewall would eliminate their security problems.
“What you say about Project Texas simply does not succeed in the odor test”, ” said The representative Angie Craig, Democrat of Minnesota. “My voters fear that Tiktok and the Chinese Communist Party will control their data and see our own vulnerabilities. … What you are doing in Texas is all good, but it is not enough to be convinced that our privacy is not in danger.”
Like Buzzfeed News exclusively reported Last year, the employees of Bytedance based in China accessed the data of non -public user US Tiktok several times between September 2021 and January 2022. In December, Bytedance declared in a statement That an internal investigation revealed that the personal data of Tiktok users of the Buzzfeed News journalist who broke up history – and several other journalists who cover Tiktok – had been accessible without authorization by bytedance employees who were then dismissed.
When asked by representative Neal Dunn, a Republican from Florida, during the hearing, if the Byédance had already spied on American citizens, Chew replied“I don’t think” espionage “is the right way to describe it.”
