A U.S. ban of Chinese-owned TikTok, the country's
most popular social media for young people, seems increasingly probable after
the grilling of its CEO by Washington lawmakers last week.
The chief
executive of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, defended his company’s
relationship with China, as well as the protections for its youngest users.
Chew spent much
of the five-hour hearing stressing TikTok’s distance from the Chinese
government. He talked about Project Texas – an effort to move all US data to
domestic servers – and said the company was deleting all US user data that is
backed up to servers outside of the country by the end of the year.
Chew emphasized that TikTok is global in nature, not available in mainland China, and headquartered in Singapore and Los Angeles.
TikTok has more than 150 million active monthly US users. That’s almost half the US.
TikTok began its meteoric rise in 2018. Today, a majority of teens in the US say they use TikTok – with 67% of people ages 13 to 17 saying they have used the app and 16% of that age group saying they use it “almost constantly”, according to the Pew Research Center.
This has raised a number of concerns about the app’s impact on young users’ safety, with self-harm and eating disorder-related content spreading on the platform. TikTok is also facing lawsuits over deadly “challenges” that have gone viral on the app. TikTok has introduced features in response to such criticisms, including automatic time limits for users under 18.
- Who is Shou Zi Chew?
Chew was born in January 1983 in Singapore. After
completing mandatory military service
for the Singaporean government as a teenager, he then moved to England to
enroll at University College London. After earning a bachelor's degree in
economics, he then landed a job as an investment banker for Goldman Sachs in
London.
A few years later, he left that role to
move again — this time to the United States — to enroll in Harvard Business
School in 2008. While still at Harvard, Chew took an internship in 2009
at a then-modest startup technology company called Facebook.
After graduating from Harvard in 2010, Chew spent a
decade working for a venture capital firm in Hong Kong and a consumer
electronics manufacturer in Beijing.
In 2021, he joined TikTok and its parent company
ByteDance in a dual role of TikTok CEO and ByteDance chief financial officer.
Chew reports to ByteDance CEO Liang Rubo.
Chew is married to Vivian Kao and they
have two children
From The Guardian (edited)
