TikTok CEO to testify before Congress in March

CNN
 — 

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew will testify at an impending listening to before the Residence Energy and Commerce Committee, a committee spokesperson confirmed to CNN Monday.

Chew will be the sole witness at the listening to, scheduled for March 23. He is expected to testify on TikTok’s privateness and details stability tactics, its effects on youthful users, and its “relationship to the Chinese Communist Social gathering,” in accordance to a listening to announcement on the committee’s web site.

“We’ve designed our problems crystal clear with TikTok,” reported the committee’s chair, Washington Republican Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, in a assertion. “It is now time to proceed the committee’s efforts to maintain Large Tech accountable by bringing TikTok right before the committee to give full and straightforward answers for people today.”

Chew’s impending testimony was to start with described by The Wall Street Journal.

“We welcome the prospect to set the report straight about TikTok, ByteDance, and the commitments we are building to tackle worries about U.S. national security right before the Property Committee on Energy and Commerce,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, claimed in a statement. “We hope that by sharing particulars of our thorough designs with the total Committee, Congress can get a more deliberative solution to the challenges at hand.”

The substantial-profile listening to underscores the mounting political risk for TikTok as its negotiations with the US governing administration on a nationwide security deal carry on to drag on.

US officials have raised issues that China could use its laws to stress TikTok or its mother or father, ByteDance, to hand over US user info that could be utilized for intelligence or disinformation uses. These issues have prompted the US authorities to ban TikTok from formal units, and additional than 50 percent of US states have taken comparable steps, according to a CNN examination.

Chew, who took around as TikTok CEO in April 2021, has mostly stayed out of the spotlight at a time when the application he potential customers can not seem to stay away from it. Members of Congress previously grilled TikTok COO Vanessa Pappas, arguably the community experience of the business in the United States, in the course of a Senate listening to very last 12 months.