It’s been a difficult few weeks for TikTok. An agreement with a government interagency group that it was depending on, which would allow the Chinese-owned app to continue to operate in the US, seems to have fallen apart. Without it, President Biden will likely soon have to make a final decision about the app: demand a sell-off, and be ready to ban TikTok if its owner ByteDance won’t oblige.
TikTok’s future in the US has perhaps never been in more doubt than it is right now. The status quo — an impasse where TikTok operates as normal with the seemingly empty threat of a ban hanging over its head — won’t be tenable for much longer. But the choices that the US and ByteDance are left with don’t seem very tenable, either.
This week might provide new clues about TikTok’s fate as its CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testifies before Congress for the first time. If he can find a few minutes in between being shouted at by various members of Congress, Chew will likely try to make the case to the American people that his app is safe, and that concerns over its links to the Chinese Communist Party are overblown. TikTok’s detractors believe the Chinese government may be using the app to collect data about its users, including Americans, and pushing content through its recommendation algorithm to influence the minds of the app’s younger-skewing user base.
Chew has been TikTok’s CEO for nearly two years, but you probably didn’t hear or see him much until recently. When a TikTok executive had to testify before Congress in September 2022, it sent chief operating officer V Pappas, a more well-known figure on the US tech scene — they worked at YouTube before joining TikTok in 2019, and briefly served as TikTok’s interim CEO before Chew took the reins. Pappas has also been happy to give the occasional interview to the press. Chew is based in Singapore and kept a low profile in the US until recently when he began to make TikTok’s case to the media and appealed
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