- reporter, James Clayton
- reporter, BBC North America Tech Correspondent
The moment of the hearing where tension lingered around
The clawed questions were constantly pouring in. Chu Shouzi, CEO of TikTok, a video-sharing platform launched by Chinese company ByteDance, attended a US House hearing on the 23rd (local time) and was harassed with questions for four and a half hours.
As one congressman pointed out, it was a time that felt longer than a marathon. CEO Chu, who worked hard to explain and present evidence, must have felt this more clearly than anyone else.
In fact, besides CEO Chu, there were many tech company executives who sat in the same seat and were bombarded with questions, and many of them were not easily passed over.
However, this hearing was different. Malicious questions continued stubbornly without end.
Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans backed down an inch.
After the hearing, a spokesperson for TikTok assessed that US lawmakers “acted to attract public attention,” which is also true to some extent.
However, I was able to figure out a thing or two from the sometimes frustratingly lengthy questions of the lawmakers.
CEO Choo, ‘My children don’t use TikTok’
During the hearing, Congresswoman Nanette Barragan, a Democrat, asked Chu if her children use TikTok.
In response, CEO Chu replied that he does not use it because he lives in Singapore. The explanation is that there is no version of the TikTok app for children under the age of 13 in Singapore.
He explained that there is a separate version of the TikTok app for children in the United States, and that if their children were living in the United States, they would have allowed it to be used.
“150 million Americans love TikTok,” TikTok CEO said at a US Congressional hearing
Some ByteDance Employees Have Access to US Data
Meanwhile, CEO Chu repeatedly emphasized the company’s policy called ‘Project Texas’, which states that data acquired in the US is stored in Oracle’s cloud environment under the supervision of the US company ‘Oracle’.
However, ‘Project Texas’ is not complete.
Chu also acknowledged that, for now, some ByteDance engineers in China have access to these data.
“We rely on global interoperability, and engineers in China have access to the data,” he explains.
And U.S. politicians persistently inquired about it. It is argued that if engineers in China can access data, it is not correct to assume that the Chinese government can also access it.
CEO Choo owns stake in ByteDance
Perhaps the most difficult issue for Chu to defend at this hearing is the relationship between TikTok and ByteDance. CEO Choo struggled to differentiate between ByteDance and TikTok.
However, anyway, ByteDance is the parent company of TikTok, and CEO Chu is also the former CFO of ByteDance.
When the question was first asked, Chu did not want to reveal whether he owned a stake in ByteDance. However, as lawmakers continued to press him, he eventually admitted to owning it, while trying to somehow reduce the association between Byte Dance and TikTok.
Counterattack: ‘Look at Cambridge Analytica’
Throughout the hearing, CEO Chu did not fight back strongly against the lawmakers, but there were occasional rare moments when he counterattacked. And it worked quite well.
When asked about TikTok’s use of user data, Chu said, “With all due respect, US companies (also) aren’t doing very well with user data… Just look at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.”
It was a sharp answer, but a pretty reasonable point.
In the past, it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm, collected the data of third-party app users such as US’Facebook’ without user consent, causing a great controversy in 2018.
US Congress unites against TikTok
Even before this hearing began, U.S. lawmakers had been bipartisan critics targeting TikTok, but in this hearing, the two parties revealed their open distrust and skepticism.
Rep. Buddy Carter, a Republican, even said, “Welcome to the most bipartisan committee in Congress.”
Representative Dan Crenshaw, a Republican, said, “CEO Chu, thank you for bringing the Republican Party and the Democratic Party together.”
It was amazing to see politicians who disagreed with each other on virtually every issue come together in complete agreement that TikTok was a threat to US security.
Meanwhile, after the hearing, TikTok’s side complained that the committee did not pay much attention to TikTok’s measures to keep user data safe.
A spokesperson for TikTok said, “Today lawmakers say that 5 million companies that depend on TikTok for their livelihood, or a platform that 150 million Americans love, is banned. [미국의] It did not say what it meant in the First Amendment.”
Meanwhile, TikTok is now known to engage in aggressive lobbying in Washington, spending millions of dollars. And judging from this hearing, it seems that more lobbying funds will be needed in the future.
The chairman of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee told TikTok CEO, “I will not believe (whatever he claims).”