In a spectacle that could only take place on Capitol Hill—where tech hearing decorum meets amateur hour interrogations—TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew squared off with US lawmakers on Thursday, valiantly attempting to convince them that his company is not the digital incarnation of a Trojan horse for the Chinese Communist Party.
Chew, who looked impeccably composed for someone being accused of peddling foreign influence to teenagers dancing in oversized hoodies, assured members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee that TikTok’s allegiance lies not with Beijing but with its 150 million American users. That number, incidentally, is roughly the population of Russia but with more cat filters and less military hardware.
Lawmakers, undeterred by corporate assurances or the fact that Chew is Singaporean and not operating out of a secret bunker under the Forbidden City, peppered him with questions ranging from the plausible—such as concerns over data privacy—to the charmingly ambitious, including whether TikTok is using the platform to manipulate elections or melt the minds of America’s youth. Several lawmakers appeared shocked that their own staffers had used the app, raising questions not so much about TikTok as about the digital habits of Hill interns.
Chew repeatedly pointed to Project Texas, TikTok’s bold plan to house U.S. user data on American soil in partnership with Oracle—a sentence that certainly inspires confidence in very specific circles. Project Texas, for those keeping score at home, is not a vintage John Wayne film but rather a billion-dollar effort to reassure Washington that TikTok users’ lip-sync videos are not being siphoned off to a server farm in Shenzhen.
Still, bipartisan skepticism flowed like a congressional subcommittee’s coffee budget, with Republicans and Democrats finding rare alignment in their shared distrust of the viral video app that somehow managed to rope in everyone from suburban moms to Senate aides. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the committee’s chair, began with a blunt assessment, informing Chew that “TikTok should be banned.” A strong opener, possibly borrowed from a break-up letter.
The White House, for its part, has not clarified whether it intends to follow through with a ban or is simply enjoying watching Congress try to understand how For You pages work. Meanwhile, TikTok has launched its own PR blitz, rallying creators and users alike, some of whom likely learned for the first time last week that TikTok even has a CEO.
“Let me state this unequivocally,” Chew said, practicing the rare art of declarative corporate sincerity, “ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country.”
So the battle lines are drawn. Congress is concerned that TikTok is a surveillance tool masquerading as a meme factory, while TikTok insists it is simply the digital town square where teenagers generate synchronized dance content for reasons yet unknown to science.
In the end, Chew’s marathon testimony probably did little to change minds but at least gave lawmakers a chance to appear tough on China while their constituents asked if they could “like and subscribe” to their representative’s questioning.
And as always in Washington, nothing says national security threat quite like a 30-second video of someone eating pickles in ASMR.