washington : TikTok chief executive Shou Zi Chew will appear before the US Energy and Commerce Committee in March as lawmakers investigate the Chinese-owned video-sharing app.
Chew will testify before the committee on March 23, which will be his first appearance before a congressional committee, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the panel’s Republican chair, said in a statement on Monday.
The news comes as the House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to vote next month on a bill aimed at blocking the use of TikTok in the United States over national security concerns.
McMorris Rodgers said, “TikTok, owned by ByteDance, knowingly allowed the Chinese Communist Party the ability to access American user data.”
TikTok confirmed on Monday that Munch would testify.
“The demand to ban TikTok outright reflects a different approach to national security and a different approach to broader industry issues such as data protection, privacy and online harm,” TikTok said on Friday.
McMorris Rodgers and other Republican lawmakers have demanded more information from TikTok. The statement said they wanted additional details on the potential sexual exploitation of minors amid concerns about the harmful material’s impact on young people.
For three years, TikTok – which has more than 100 million US users – has been trying to assure Washington that personal data of US citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be viewed as being influenced by China’s Communist Party or Beijing. Cannot be manipulated by anyone else.
The US government’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a powerful national security body, ordered ByteDance to divest TikTok in 2020 because of fears that US user data could be passed to China’s government.
CFIUS and TikTok have been in talks for more than two years with the aim of reaching a national security agreement to protect the data of US TikTok users.
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