TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear before Congress in March to field questions about the viral video app’s security measures amid mounting efforts to ban it because of privacy concerns.
Chew will appear at a March 23 hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in his first time testifying before Congress, the committee said Monday. Lawmakers will question him on TikTok’s consumer privacy and data security practices, the platform’s effect on children, and the app’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party, committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., announced in a statement.
TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, has come under increased scrutiny after media reports showed possible security breaches. Last month, President Joe Biden signed legislation banning TikTok on government devices. Several lawmakers are supporting legislation to ban the app from the U.S. entirely.
“Big Tech has increasingly become a destructive force in American society,” McMorris Rodgers said in her statement. “ByteDance-owned TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data. Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms.”
The ban Biden approved, which was wrapped into the omnibus spending bill, included limited exceptions for law enforcement, national security and security research purposes. It does not apply to members of Congress and their staffs, though members of the House have been prohibited from downloading the app on government-issued mobile phones.
TikTok criticized the ban in a statement, arguing that the prohibition was “a political gesture that will do nothing to advance national security interests.”
Chris Meserole, director of research at the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, noted that American-owned social media companies are accountable to the U.S. government if they abuse users’ data. TikTok, by contrast, is owned by a Chinese firm that is accountable to the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
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“What happens to your data, if it does leak out of the U.S., is kind of beyond the ability of the U.S. government to control or to influence,” he said in an interview with NBC News.
Last month, under criticism from lawmakers and regulators, the company created a new U.S.-based team for trust and safety issues.
