New York (CNN) In his first appearance before Congress on Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Chew was criticized by lawmakers who expressed deep skepticism about his company’s efforts to protect US user data and ease concerns about its ties to China.
It was a rare chance for audiences to hear from Chew, who offers very few interviews. Yet his company’s app is among the most popular in America, with more than 150 million active users.
Here are the biggest takeaways from Thursday’s hearing.
Washington has already made up its mind about TikTok
The hearing, which lasted more than five hours, began with calls from lawmakers to ban the app in the United States and remained combative throughout. It offered a stark display of bipartisan pressure to scrap the popular short-form video app and the company’s uphill battle to improve relations with Washington.
Washington Republican Cathy McMorris Rogers, chairwoman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, opened Thursday’s hearing by telling Shaw, “Your platform should be banned.”
Chu used his testimony to highlight TikTok’s independence from China and to highlight its ties to the US. “TikTok itself is not available in mainland China, we are headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore and have 7,000 employees in the US today,” he said in his opening remarks.
“However, we have heard serious concerns about the potential for unwanted foreign access to US data and potential manipulation of the TikTok ecosystem in the US,” Chu said. “Our approach has never been to dismiss or downplay any of these concerns. We dealt with them with real action.”
TikTok does not work in China. But since the Chinese government enjoys significant influence over businesses under its jurisdiction, the theory is that ByteDance, and thus indirectly TikTok, could be forced to cooperate with a wide range of security activities, including the possible transfer of TikTok data.
Much of Chu’s attempts to emphasize that his company is not part of the Chinese government appeared to fall on deaf ears. Many members of Congress interrupted the CEO’s testimony to say they simply did not believe him.
“To the American people watching today, hear this: TikTok is a weapon of the Chinese Communist Party to spy on you, manipulate what you see, and use for generations to come,” said Congressman McMorris Rogers.
In a conversation with California Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, Chu spoke about TikTok’s ongoing efforts to protect user data in the U.S. and said he has “not seen evidence that the Chinese government has access to this data; they never asked us, we never provided it.”
“I find that absurd,” replied Eshoo.
“I looked — and I didn’t see any evidence of that happening,” Chu replied. “Our commitment is to move their data to the United States to be stored on American soil by an American company controlled by American personnel.” So the risk would be similar to any government going to an American company and asking for data.”
“I don’t believe that TikTok — that you said or did anything to convince us,” Eshoo said.
TikTok’s CEO emphasizes that its practices are no different from those of American tech giants
As lawmakers redoubled their questions about TikTok’s data collection practices, Chu also emphasized that the data TikTok collects is data “that is often collected by many other companies in our industry.”
“We are committed to being very transparent with our users about what we collect,” Chu said. “I don’t believe what we’re collecting is more than most players in the industry.”
Independent researchers supported Chu’s claims. In 2020, The Washington Post worked with a privacy researcher to look behind TikTok’s hood, concluding that the app appears to collect no more data than a typical mainstream social network. The following year, Pellaeon Lin, a Taiwan-based researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, conducted another technical analysis that reached similar conclusions.
Still, even if TikTok collects about the same amount of information as Facebook or Twitter, it’s still a lot of data, including information about the videos you watch, the comments you write, the private messages you send, and — if you agree to share this level of access — your exact geolocation and contact lists. (Chew said on Thursday that current versions of TikTok do not collect accurate GPS information from users in the US.)
TikTok’s impact on children is a key point of focus
While national security was expected to be the main focus of the hearing, many lawmakers also highlighted concerns about TikTok’s impact on children.
New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone, a ranking member of the committee, for example, said Thursday: “Research has found that TikTok’s algorithms recommend videos to teens that create and exacerbate feelings of emotional distress, including videos that promote suicide, self-harm and eating disorders .”
Representative Bob Latta, R-Ohio, accused TikTok of promoting a video of the so-called “blackout challenge” or choking challenge of a 10-year-old Pennsylvania girl who later died after trying to imitate a challenge in the video .
Republican Rep. Gus Bilirakis of Florida also said there is a lack of adequate content moderation, leaving room for children to be exposed to content that promotes self-harm.
“Your technology literally leads to death,” Bilirakis told Chu.
Referring to examples of harmful content offered to children, he said: “It is unacceptable sir, even after knowing all these dangers, that you continue to claim that TikTok is something spectacular to watch.”
TikTok, for its part, has launched a number of features in recent months to provide additional safeguards for younger users, including setting a new 60-minute daily limit by default for those under 18. Even this feature, however, was criticized by lawmakers as too easy for teenagers to circumvent.
Chu has been criticized for dodging questions. TikTok said Congress doesn’t care about its answers
Congressman Tony Cardenas, D-Calif., criticized what he saw as Chu’s indirect answers and compared him to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has also frustrated some members of Congress in his own testimony in the past.
“You are one of the few people who brought this committee together,” Cárdenas told Chu. “You remind me a lot of Mark Zuckerberg. When he came here, I said to my team, “He reminds me of Fred Astaire—a good word dancer.” And you’re doing the same thing today. Many of your answers are a bit vague; they are not yes or no.”
Zuckerberg testified before the same committee for hours in 2018 following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Although both Chu and Zuckerberg run major social media platforms, Zuckerberg was already a household name when he went before lawmakers in 2018. Chu, meanwhile, has largely stayed out of the spotlight since taking the helm of TikTok in 2021.
To prepare for his appearance Thursday, CNN has learned that Chu has spent the past week in near-daily, hours-long prep sessions. The TikTok staff worked to refine and polish Chew’s presentation during these sessions. They played the roles of legislators with different questioning styles, loading Chew with practice questions and scenarios to prepare him for hours of relentless questioning.
But TikTok said Congress isn’t interested in hearing Chew’s answers.
“Shaw came prepared to answer questions from Congress,” TikTok spokeswoman Brooke Oberwetter told CNN in a statement after the hearing concluded. “But, unfortunately, the day was dominated by political posturing that failed to recognize the real solutions already underway.”
Perhaps no exchange summed up Thursday’s hearing as a moment after Congresswoman Kat Cammack’s lengthy critique of TikTok’s content moderation and ties to China.
“May I answer, Chairman?” Chu asked McMorris Rogers after Cammack’s time was up.
McMorris Rogers thought about Chu for a moment.
“No. We will move forward,” she said.
The federal government is stepping up its rhetoric
Outside the hearing room, federal officials appeared to have stepped up their rhetoric about TikTok.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said TikTok must be “stopped one way or another”, but noted that “there are different ways to do it”. Speaking at a separate hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Blinken said he did not know if it would be enough for TikTok to divest itself of its Chinese parent company.
The top US diplomat said he believed the app was a threat to US national security, but did not directly say it should be banned. “It’s clear that we, the administration and others, are caught up in the challenge it poses and are taking action to address it,” he said.
In a separate statement on Thursday that did not specifically address or name TikTok, the US Treasury Department – the agency that chairs the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) – warned that it “will not clear any transaction unless decided there are no outstanding national security issues.”
“Broadly speaking, some transactions may pose data security risks – including giving a foreign person or government access to a set of sensitive personal data of Americans, as well as access to intellectual property, source code or other potentially sensitive information.” , a spokesman for the ministry said. “CFIUS, on a case-by-case basis, will ensure the protection of national security, including to prevent the misuse of data through espionage, surveillance and other means that threaten national security.”
For more than two years, CFIUS and TikTok have been negotiating a possible deal that could address U.S. security concerns and allow the app to continue operating in the United States.
But in his testimony, Chu sought to ease long-standing concerns about the app and called fears about the Chinese government accessing TikTok’s user data “hypothetical.”
“I think a lot of the risks that are being raised are hypothetical and theoretical risks,” Chu said. “I haven’t seen any evidence. I look forward to discussions where we can talk about the evidence and then address the concerns that are raised.”