TikTok CEO to testify earlier than U.S. Congress over safety considerations

CHRIS DELMAS / AFP

TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew will seem earlier than the U.S. Energy and Commerce Committee in March, as lawmakers scrutinize the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.

Chew will testify earlier than the committee on March 23, which might be his first look earlier than a congressional committee, stated Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the Republican chair of the panel, in a press release on Monday.

The news comes because the House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to carry a vote subsequent month on a invoice aimed toward blocking the usage of TikTok within the United States over nationwide safety considerations.

“ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data,” McMorris Rodgers stated, including that Americans need to understand how these actions impression their privateness and knowledge safety.

TikTok confirmed on Monday Chew will testify.

It stated on Friday “calls for total bans of TikTok take a piecemeal approach to national security and a piecemeal approach to broad industry issues like data security, privacy, and online harms”.

McMorris Rodgers and different Republican lawmakers have demanded extra data from TikTok. They need to know its impression on younger folks amid considerations about dangerous content material, and so they need further particulars on potential sexual exploitation of minors on the platform, the assertion stated.

For three years, TikTok – which has greater than 100 million U.S. customers – has been searching for to guarantee Washington that the private knowledge of U.S. residents can’t be accessed and its content material can’t be manipulated by China’s Communist Party or anybody else below Beijing’s affect.

The U.S. authorities’s Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States (CFIUS), a robust nationwide safety physique, in 2020 ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok due to fears that U.S. person knowledge might be handed onto China’s authorities.

CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for greater than two years aiming to achieve a nationwide safety settlement to guard the information of U.S. TikTok customers.