Last week, TikTok's CEO testified before the US Congress. I watched the entire 7-hour broadcast so you don't have to, and here's the whole case as an in-depth analysis.
Background to the hearing
Each representative had five minutes to put questions to TikTok's CEO. The hearing lasted 4.5 hours in total. TikTok has 150 million users in the US.
In practice, all the concerns about TikTok came down to two things: the algorithm and data security.
The algorithm: What content does it show young people, and can China influence what content the West sees? TikTok's algorithm is the most addictive, in other words the “best”, of all the social media platforms, and one concern was whether TikTok intends to make the platform less addictive to protect young people's mental health.
Chinese ties: Is data transferred to China? What is TikTok's relationship with ByteDance (TikTok's parent company), and through that, what are its ties to the Chinese Communist Party? Is TikTok a Chinese spy app?
CEO Shou Zi Chew's answers in a nutshell:
Data security
“I have looked into it and I have seen no evidence of this happening [China having access to the data], and to assure everybody here, our commitment is to move data to the United States, to be stored on American soil, by an American company, overseen by American personnel. When this is done, all protected US data will be under the protection of US law and under the control of a US-led security team. This eliminates the concern that TikTok user data can be subject to Chinese law.”
The CEO went on to say that TikTok is the only social media company to have allowed third parties (including Oracle) to monitor its data flows and source code. US data is currently stored in Singapore and Virginia, but this will change during the year and the data will be deleted from there. A similar new data centre is also being built in Europe (source in Finnish).
ByteDance is a Chinese company that owns TikTok, but ByteDance and TikTok are not the same thing. TikTok's CEO reports to ByteDance's CEO but otherwise has no active involvement with ByteDance. Chew previously served as ByteDance's CFO and owns shares in both ByteDance and TikTok. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It is a private company, 60% owned by global institutional investors, 20% by its founder and 20% by employees around the world. ByteDance has five board members, three of whom are American. TikTok isn't available in China, which has its own app, Douyin, with its own terms of use. ByteDance's headquarters are in Los Angeles and Singapore (note: Singapore is not China). There are 7,000 employees in the US.
According to the CEO, ByteDance and TikTok have no shared or overlapping employees, so China has no access to user data. The source code has, of course, been written by a global workforce, Chinese engineers included. But in a global market, there's nothing unusual about that compared with other companies.
In the CEO's words, TikTok collects no more data than the other social media giants. Facial recognition, for example, isn't used to identify people but to locate the eyes so that a filter can be applied. The data is stored locally in the phone's cache and deleted as soon as the filter has been used. The same goes for voice filters.
Keystroke patterns are collected to identify bot users, and they're not used to store passwords or other personal information.
Algorithms
On algorithms, the CEO said that the TikTok experience for young people is much more heavily filtered. For example, there are no ads for under-13s, no direct messages for under-16s and no live streaming for under-18s. Advertising rules are also much stricter for under-18s. In the US, under-18s have a one-hour time limit on the app by default.
Nor does the algorithm censor or favour any particular political agenda. This, too, is monitored by third parties. A member of Congress wrongly claimed that it had censored the #blacklivesmatter hashtag, but it was a platform bug that briefly stopped all hashtags from working. The algorithm limits the reach of some videos, such as extreme fitness, crash diets and dangerous challenges, and doesn't show viewers many of them in a row. All of these videos also carry a link to a help centre.
The algorithm shows viewers what they want to watch. Here, too, the market economy runs on the law of supply and demand. If users watch conspiracy theories, they're fed more of them. But there's plenty of worthwhile content too, such as #BookTok with 120 billion views, which encourages people to read. The algorithm is more of a mirror of its users and of wider social problems, and in my view those can't be laid at the door of a single social media platform.
My take
Practically every member of Congress had already made up their mind that TikTok should be banned nationwide. Meta has previously spent large sums lobbying against its biggest competitor (source in Finnish), and I believe this had a strong influence behind the scenes. In practice, the representatives “asked” lots of questions but left no room to answer them. In my view, they didn't even want answers, just a speaking slot they could show their voters, “15 minutes of fame” style.
Questions were often preceded by a four-minute monologue, followed by a genuinely complex question and a demand for a yes or no answer, which obviously doesn't make for good dialogue. Many times the CEO asked for a chance to answer, and practically every single time the reply was that there was no time and they were moving on.
The CEO was skilfully media-trained and stayed cool as a cucumber throughout the hearing, unlike the members of Congress, who often raised their voices and talked over the CEO. The CEO's answers were convincing and well reasoned, and they put some of my own concerns on the topic to rest. What's more, many of the questions raised applied to all social media platforms, not just TikTok.
Even so, Congress seemed convinced of its position regardless of the hearing. It wants more restrictions and transparency for TikTok and other social media platforms.
Someone said that banning TikTok in the US would be one of the biggest things taken away from the American people since Prohibition, so I don't believe TikTok will be banned there, but its use may face restrictions or additional transparency requirements, which is of course a good thing. And even if TikTok were banned, short-form video is here to stay, and some new platform would fill the gap it left. I don't think people would flock to Meta's platforms, and many TikTok users have posted videos saying that if TikTok is removed, they'll leave Meta's platforms too.
I also have to say that we need to be aware that data may currently end up in China, but the situation will be fixed with the new data centres during this year. And even now, TikTok has passed GDPR, one of the strictest privacy laws in the world, with flying colours, so it's not exactly a data protection disaster even now. Some government bodies have banned the use of TikTok, but it's worth remembering that they take plenty of other security measures too, and TikTok isn't the only “big bad wolf”.
What everyone else thinks
The papers reported that the CEO was grilled, but if you watch clips of the hearing on social media, the comments are full of second-hand embarrassment for the whole of Congress. Judging by the comments, Congress is full of boomers who understand nothing about social media or technology. One representative even asked whether TikTok connects to a Wi-Fi network, to which the CEO replied, bemused, that it has to connect to Wi-Fi to access the internet.
Summary
The boomers didn't understand how social media works, and TikTok credibly addressed the concerns about data security and the algorithm by guaranteeing third-party oversight, the only social media company in the country to do so. TikTok isn't perfect, and much the same challenges apply to the entire social media industry. Despite all the concerns, TikTok is the world's fastest-growing social media platform, and a large share of people will use TikTok regardless of what you personally think of the platform. As individuals and organisations, we have to adapt to the change it has brought to how content is consumed and produced. Legislation to improve transparency is an important part of that.
I'll figure out everything TikTok for you. Mäksä (Linktree)
