Now, as TikTok’s chief govt, he’s turn into the face of what some Washington lawmakers have claimed, with out proof, is a shadowy Chinese spying and propaganda machine. When he takes the stand for his first congressional listening to Thursday, he’s more likely to face the grilling of a lifetime from lawmakers who argue that the app, now with 150 million U.S. customers, can’t be trusted and have to be banned or bought.
Chew, a 40-year-old native of Singapore, has labored to counter American suspicions with arduous logic, telling members of Congress in one-on-one conferences that his firm is unaffiliated with the Chinese authorities and is dedicated to constructing a “sunny corner of the internet” for colourful movies and artistic speech.
“I don’t want to go in and question anybody’s intentions. That’s not my job,” he stated in an interview final month on the firm’s WeWork suite close to Capitol Hill.
“We hear general unrelated fears, analogies, associations that don’t make sense,” he added, “and for those, I think the right approach is to make sure that we reach out to understand: Is there anything more specific you’re talking about? And how do we address that?”
His allure offensive has run up in opposition to a closely polarized and surprisingly bipartisan resistance in Washington, the place tensions with the Chinese authorities — and broader anxieties about social media and American kids — have made TikTok right into a political punching bag.
“The temperature is so high right now,” stated Jim Lewis, director of the strategic applied sciences program on the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington suppose tank. “I would not choose this week to go to the Hill unless you have a death wish.”
Chew stated he’s working to beat the “trust deficit” that lawmakers have with not simply TikTok however any firm coming from China, the world’s second-deepest wellspring of tech innovation. His congressional testimony will in all probability be broadly watched by TikTok’s thousands and thousands of American followers, its 1000’s of U.S. workers and its traders throughout the West, who fear {that a} U.S. authorities campaign might puncture its multibillion-dollar empire.
But even a persuasive efficiency by Chew will not be sufficient. Biden administration officers, like Trump appointees earlier than them, have argued that TikTok must be bought to a U.S. purchaser to resolve nationwide safety issues about how the app might funnel Americans’ knowledge to the Chinese authorities or increase Chinese propaganda — two costs for which the United States has by no means supplied proof, and which TikTok’s leaders have argued are speculative and mistaken.
Chew’s testimony might increase uncomfortable questions on what occurs when American tech giants are now not the dominant power behind what Americans see on-line. But it might additionally spotlight Washington’s rising curiosity in utilizing geopolitics to select winners and losers on the web — a difficulty with main penalties for the form of the long run net.
TikTok could also be simply the beginning. Of the Apple App Store’s 10 most-downloaded free apps within the United States, 4 are owned by Chinese corporations, three of which rank above TikTok: PDD Holdings’ buying app Temu; the fast-fashion titan Shein; and one other ByteDance app, the video editor CapCut, which has greater than 200 million lively customers worldwide.
Jeffrey Towson, a former professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management who now works as a tech marketing consultant, stated Chew’s time at ByteDance coincides with China’s ascent on the worldwide web, together with the creation of the primary Chinese-owned app Americans know and use.
“The idea that a Chinese social media company could break into the U.S. against Facebook and YouTube — that was a crazy idea back then, and now they’re all trying to do it, but ByteDance was the first,” Towson stated.
“TikTok is now the case study” for a way American lawmakers will reply, he added. “If you give them the power to ban social media companies, you think this is going to be the only time it happens?”
‘Like any good start-up story’
Before taking on TikTok in 2021, Chew adopted the form of top-tier company trajectory made doable by the globalization of contemporary tech.
He was born and raised in Singapore, the island nation in Southeast Asia that has turn into a distinguished bridge for worldwide enterprise between China and the West. He left to review economics at a London college, saying in an interview final 12 months that “the thing about growing up on a small island … is you get wanderlust at a very young age.”
He moved to the United States to get his grasp’s diploma at Harvard Business School, assembly his spouse in California throughout a summer season internship whereas they have been each working at start-ups, he informed a Harvard alumni journal. Hers was at a clean-energy firm whereas his was at Facebook, the then-ascendant social community that has since turn into TikTok’s bitter enemy.
Chew labored as an funding analyst at Goldman Sachs earlier than becoming a member of the Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner’s enterprise capital agency, DST Global, recognized for its bets on main tech companies, together with Facebook and Twitter. As a companion there, Chew helped coordinate one of many earliest investments in ByteDance by constructing relationships with its two younger founding engineers, Liang Rubo and Zhang Yiming. (Milner renounced his Russian citizenship final 12 months.)
“They recognized an opportunity to build a good product people wanted,” Chew stated at a DealBook convention late final 12 months. “I had the chance to invest in them, we became friends, and slowly, like any good start-up story, the product grew bigger and bigger.”
Though recognized within the United States primarily for TikTok, ByteDance has over time turn into one of many world’s most respected software program factories, feverishly rolling out greater than 100 apps throughout classes starting from office communication (Lark) to video video games (“Mobile Legends: Bang Bang”).
ByteDance’s first hit, the information app Toutiao, used a suggestion algorithm to personalize individuals’s feeds based mostly on their tastes and behaviors; the identical concept would drive TikTok to world stardom after it launched in 2017.
The Beijing-based firm now says it runs places of work in practically 120 cities world wide, together with Austin, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. But its measurement and prominence have additionally landed it within the crosshairs of the Chinese state: In 2018, after ByteDance was pressured to shut a comedy app that regulators had deemed “vulgar and improper,” the founders stated in an apologetic public letter that they’d work to make sure that communist values have been “broadcast to strength.”
In 2021, ByteDance employed Chew as its chief monetary officer, pulling him from one other Chinese tech agency, the smartphone big Xiaomi, the place he had helped lead an preliminary public providing and announce new traces of pc displays.
By the time of his hiring, the Trump administration had already ordered the fast-growing app banned or bought to an American firm, and the Chinese authorities had responded by declaring its know-how a strategic asset, blocking any doable sale.
Before the Trump implosion, ByteDance employed Kevin Mayer, a Disney govt who had helped launch its streaming community, as TikTok’s CEO, believing he’d assist develop TikTok’s world footprint. But when Mayer resigned after three months, citing a “sharply changed” political setting, the corporate elevated Chew into the position.
After years of claiming little about its negotiations with U.S. officers, TikTok has in current months moved to extra aggressively inform its aspect of the story, saying it had for too lengthy ceded floor to critics who have been slamming the corporate with baseless claims.
Top TikTok officers — in addition to ByteDance’s prime lawyer, the previous Microsoft govt Erich Andersen — have carried out in-depth briefings with journalists, researchers and policymakers. The firm has additionally hosted press occasions at a TikTok “transparency center” in Los Angeles, replete with museum-style reveals wherein journalists can evaluation how the app’s code and moderation programs work.
Chew and his bosses at ByteDance have pushed the concept they don’t seem to be so totally different from the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. ByteDance’s founders have recorded movies of them touring their first Beijing residence workplace, echoing the nostalgic mythmaking that executives at Apple and different tech corporations made in style by means of visits to outdated San Francisco Bay Area dorm rooms and garages.
In a video from Washington posted Tuesday on the corporate’s TikTok account, Chew wore the cliche ensemble of American tech geeks — a blue hoodie and denims — and requested TikTokers to go away feedback about what they needed their elected representatives to know concerning the app. One of the highest feedback stated, “You know something went wrong when the boss has to show up,” with a cry-laughing emoji.
Chew, a married father of two based mostly in Singapore, has spent a lot of the previous a number of weeks in Washington, working to personally meet with members of Congress — together with all of the members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, earlier than which he’ll be testifying — to clarify the corporate’s place.
The firm had been negotiating since 2019 with the Committee on Foreign Investment within the United States, a cross-agency group generally known as CFIUS, on alternate options to divestiture that will fulfill U.S. nationwide safety issues.
In August, TikTok provided CFIUS a 90-page blueprint for a $1.5 billion restructuring plan that will give the U.S. authorities unimaginable leverage over TikTok’s American operations and open its knowledge and algorithms to inspection by the American tech firm Oracle. Chew has referred to as the plan, generally known as Project Texas, “a solution no other company is trying to pursue.”
But the Biden administration, which has stated nothing publicly concerning the proposal, has in current weeks informed the corporate that it received’t accept mitigation efforts and needs ByteDance to unload its stake as a technique to sever any ties between TikTok and its Chinese roots.
Though Project Texas would sequester a lot of TikTok’s U.S. operation in a brand new entity whose leaders can be handpicked by the federal authorities, the app nonetheless depends on code and assets overseen by China-based managers and engineers. TikTok has stated it’s going to push ahead on Project Texas regardless.
In the conferences, Chew has labored to offer technical particulars of Project Texas and talked at size concerning the firm’s investments in kids’s security efforts and content material moderation, in response to individuals who have attended. He has referred to as on lawmakers to push for industry-wide rules that will maintain TikTok and its American rivals to the identical algorithm.
He has additionally urged them to suppose previous the counter-lobbying of TikTok’s rivals, most notably Facebook mum or dad firm Meta, which The Washington Post first reported final 12 months had funded a nationwide media and lobbying marketing campaign designed to painting its rival as a generational menace.
Chew stated he intends to inform lawmakers in the course of the listening to that the largely lighthearted leisure app now has greater than 150 million month-to-month lively customers within the United States — a 50 % acquire within the final two years — and {that a} ban would stomp on their speech freedoms and undermine Americans’ cultural cachet world wide.
But he has additionally, with assist from a high-level preparatory workforce inside TikTok, labored to metal himself for committee members’ responses, which in all probability will embody an onslaught of powerful questions and moments designed to elicit viral sound bites.
During TikTok’s final congressional look, in September, the corporate’s chief working officer, a former YouTube govt named V Pappas, was pummeled by lawmakers, together with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who referred to as the corporate “a walking security nightmare.” Pappas stated in Los Angeles this month that among the lawmakers’ criticism is pushed by “xenophobia.”
Chew has labored to be outwardly diplomatic and understanding, telling The Post that some members of Congress he met with in current weeks had “some misunderstandings” however that they nonetheless had “the right to ask questions.”
But others inside the corporate have described the conferences with uncooked exasperation, saying among the most crucial lawmakers have been stubbornly misinformed or trafficked in unsubstantiated theories that the corporate is an arm of China’s Communist Party.
Some, they stated, have been receptive to their concepts in non-public however appeared all too comfortable to assault the corporate when showing in a while nationwide TV. Some lawmakers have informed The Post they left their conferences with Chew fully unconvinced: “I don’t think there’s anything they can say,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) stated final month.
Unlike in additional conventional company hearings, the corporate has needed to go it alone: Its few allies in Washington embody NetChoice, a tech {industry} group of which it’s a member. Oracle executives have provided briefings by request to a couple lawmakers on how items of Project Texas may work however haven’t spoken publicly in assist.
One of TikTok’s few vocal congressional supporters, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) — who has 158,000 followers on the app — stated Tuesday that he would maintain a information convention with TikTok creators outdoors the Capitol on the day earlier than the listening to about how the ban would undermine their free-speech rights.
Under Chew, the corporate has unveiled a set of options this month designed to neutralize among the commonest critiques of the corporate.
It introduced new screen-time restrictions for youngsters, who can be restricted to an hour a day until a mum or dad or guardian enters a particular bypass code — an echo of the same coverage adopted by Chinese regulators. It additionally began permitting customers to reset the sorts of movies popping up on their essential “For You” feeds, serving to them extra instantly form the advice algorithm that its critics have stated is prone to political meddling.
In conferences with Chew, lawmakers routinely argued that TikTok within the United States trafficked solely in viral nonsense whereas ByteDance’s China-only model of TikTok, referred to as Douyin, boosted movies devoted to schooling and enrichment. The firm has typically argued that this declare is baseless, given {that a} fast search of TikTok within the United States yields hours of instructional movies, and has famous that China’s web makes use of paternalistic social guidelines and restrictions to form on-line content material in a approach that will run counter to American values.
Earlier this month, nevertheless, TikTok introduced that it will add tabs to its essential feeds within the United States devoted to instructional movies about science, know-how, engineering and math.
Chew, who has stated he likes studying about theoretical physics, has stated these are the sorts of movies that pop up on his TikTok feed, alongside stand-up comedy jokes and movies about golf.
The assertion is according to a lot of what Chew has informed lawmakers: that the TikTok they could be so afraid of, and that they could by no means have checked out, is much extra innocent than they suppose.
“I learn a lot of stuff,” he stated with a smile. “Not everybody has had the chance to use our platform, right?”
Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.
clarification
The Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner renounced his Russian citizenship final 12 months.