TikTok CEO to testify before Congress after Biden threat to ban app
Per the written testimony, the CEO will state, "Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,"
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TikTok's chief executive, Zi Chew, at a Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore, on November 16, 2022. (Bloomberg)
After the Biden administration reportedly threatened the Chinese owners of the social media platform TikTok to ban it across the US if they did not sell their stakes, the platform's chief executive Zi Chew is due to testify before Congress on Thursday.
According to the official’s written testimony, which was posted by the House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee, Zi states that the app “never shared, or received a request to share, US user data with the Chinese government”, as he is also anticipated to confirm that the app's parent company, ByteDance, is not state-owned or controlled.
Read next: Canada bans TikTok from government devices over alleged China threat
Per the written testimony, the CEO will state, "Let me state this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,"
Recently, in order to comply with a US Congress-ordered prohibition, the White House in February granted federal agencies a deadline of 30 days to have the Chinese-owned video app TikTok removed from all government-issued devices.
In a memorandum, Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, urged federal organizations to "remove and disallow installations" of the app on agency-owned or operated IT devices and to "prohibit internet traffic" from such devices to the app within 30 days.
Trying not to poke the bear
Referencing unnamed sources. a US newspaper claimed that the sale of ByteDance was put through by the Biden administration’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), which is a multi-agency federal task force responsible for national security risks in cross-border investments.
In response, TikTok spokesperson Brooke Oberwetter released a statement that a coerced sale would exacerbate the tensions regarding the deemed security risk, and vowed to invest $1.5 billion in a program intended to protect American user data from access by the Chinese government.
A previous ban was attempted in 2020 by former US President Donald Trump, but the Biden administration canceled it and later went back on it.
Some US governors have prohibited state officials from having TikTok on their phones, which the platform viewed as a politically-motivated move.
