TikTok Hearing: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before US lawmakers

TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew has tested before the United States Congress in a hearing that took over five hours, packed with questions and references from various angles.

Members of the United States House Committee on Energy and Commerce oversaw the hearing of Chew to justify that the social media app does not pose a threat to its users in the United States. The Committee’s main concern was linked to TikTok’s mother company ByteDance, which they claimed had ties with the Chinese government.

They also asked Chew if he was in contact with the Chinese government and “questioned whether the company’s proposed solution called Project Texas would offer sufficient protection against Chinese laws that require companies to make user data accessible to the government.”

With the United States being the country with the most users on TikTok aside from China, some sources claim that the country is doing everything it can to ban the app from its millions of users. An estimated number of 100 million users on TikTok are from the United States alone.

There have been several angles to this ban, as some claim that TikTok is taking dominion over the social media scene and drastically sweeping Facebook and Instagram off their feet effortlessly, while Twitter is hanging on a light thread. There are heavy forces behind the push to ban them in the United States considering that the app is not US-owned or belongs to a US national. Others also state that the algorithm of TikTok in the US is way different from what Chinese users see and use. The algorithm in China tends to educate users and limit screen time for underage users while many negative videos and trends are pushed to the US algorithm and other countries.