Who Is TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew?

On March 23, a bipartisan US Congress interrogated TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for around four and a half hours amid growing calls for a ban on the platform in the US due to worries about the Chinese government's influence on the business.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee summoned Chew to testify regarding TikTok's "consumer privacy and data security policies, the platforms' effects on children, and their ties to the Chinese Communist Party" before the committee.

Members of the committee from the Democratic and Republican parties grilled Chew hard while highlighting threats to national security posed by the video-sharing site.

In his defense of TikTok, Chew claimed that the business is taking "serious action" to allay Washington's concerns that the 150 million American users of the network pose some sort of data security danger.

Chew testified that neither the Chinese Communist Party nor the Chinese government receive data from TikTok, whose parent firm is China's ByteDance.

Although Chew attempted to defend his business, he did acknowledge that ByteDance engineers in China have access to data, according to the BBC.

The BBC reported him as adding, "We rely on global interoperability, Chinese technologists have access to data."

Concerns over TikTok's users' data being spied on by the Chinese government have caused controversy in a number of nations and groups. The app has been outlawed on government-owned devices by Belgium, New Zealand, Norway, Taiwan, the UK, and the European Parliament. TikTok and numerous other Chinese apps were subject to a statewide ban in India in 2020.

The government, under the direction of President Joe Biden, reportedly ordered that all federal employees remove the social media program from government-issued mobile devices within 30 days, according to a report in the US media on February 28. The Canadian government recently announced a similar prohibition.