Lawmakers reject CEO’s assurance TikTok is autonomous from China

Home lawmakers on Thursday voiced disbelief at TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s assurances that the app has no hyperlink with China or its Communist Celebration, and Home Vitality and Commerce Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers flatly declared that the “platform needs to be banned.”

Chew, a Singaporean citizen educated within the U.Ok. and the U.S. and now dwelling within the U.S., turned the most recent tech firm government to be confronted by lawmakers on knowledge privateness, risks to children from extreme use of social media apps, and the potential for international governments to affect People by means of such platforms.

In testimony to Home Vitality and Commerce, Chew repeatedly denied that TikTok, a U.S.-based firm headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, is managed by its China-based guardian ByteDance. However these assurances gave the impression to be weakened when China’s Commerce Ministry on Thursday stated it could oppose a pressured sale of TikTok, as is being contemplated by the Biden administration, as a result of such a sale would contain the export of Chinese language know-how.

“I count on in the present day you may say something to keep away from this final result,” Rodgers, R-Wash., stated of her conclusion that the app needs to be banned. “Such as you’re 100% chargeable for what TikTok does, that you simply instantly endorse the nationwide knowledge privateness commonplace … that TikTok does not hurt our harmless kids or that your ties to the Chinese language Communist Celebration by means of ByteDance is a fable. We aren’t shopping for it.”

Rodgers stated TikTok’s plans to retailer American customers’ knowledge in servers owned and operated by Oracle in Texas was no “greater than a advertising scheme.”