TikTok CEO grilled over internal memo instructing senior managers to 'downplay the China association'

Rep. Kat Cammack, R-Fla., blasted TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew on Thursday over an internal memo instructing senior staffers to "downplay the China association." 

"You've said repeatedly that there is no threat, that this is a platform for entertainment and for fun," Cammack told Chew during the House Energy and Commerce Committee's hearing. "I have to ask you then, if there is no threat to Americans, if there is no threat to our data privacy, security, why did an internal memo from TikTok corporate headquarters explicitly coach senior management to, quote, ‘downplay the parent company Bytedance’? Why would they say ‘downplay the China association’ and ‘downplay A.I.’? This is from an internal memo from your company. Why, if you had nothing to hide, would you need to downplay the association with Bytedance and China? 

TikTok's CEO said he was not aware of that memo. Grilled by Cammack further, Chew also claimed he was not aware of comments from a May 2021 Communist Politburo study session in which Chinese President Xi Jinping instructed colleagues to "target different countries, different audiences with short form video." 

The TikTok CEO also denied that Zhang Fuping, secretary of ByteDance’s CCCP Committee and ByteDance’s chief editor, was his boss and said he did not have frequent contact with him. Chew did admit, however, to having regular contact with the CEO of Bytedance, who is Chew Shouzi. 

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"What’s interesting to me is that you have used the word 'transparency' over a half a dozen times in your opening testimony and subsequently again, in your answers to my colleagues. Yet the interesting thing to me is that Bytedance, your parent company, has gone out of their way to hide and airbrush corporate structure ties to the CCP, the company's founder, and their activities. You can look no further than the fact that Bytedance website has been scrubbed," Cammack said. 

She also grilled Chew over a video posted 41 days prior on TikTok that she says makes a "direct threat" of violence toward House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash. More than an hour later into the hearing, when Rep. Tony Cárdenas, D-Calif., brought up the video again, Chew said he had been briefed during the break that the video has since been removed from the platform. 

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During his opening statement, Chew began by relating that he was born in Singapore, just as his parents were, and after serving in the Singapore military, moved to the U.K. for college and then the U.S. for business school, where he met his wife, who grew up in Virginia outside of Washington, D.C. Chew also emphasized that TikTok is headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, is not available in mainland China and has more than 7,000 employees in the U.S. 

"I would also like to talk about national security concerns that you have raised that we take very, very seriously. Let me start by addressing a few misconceptions about ByteDance, of which we are a subsidiary. ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government," Chew said. "It’s a private company. Sixty percent of the company is owned by global institutional investors, 20% is owned by the founder, and 20% owned by employees around the world. ByteDance has five board members. Three of them are American." 

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U.S. lawmakers have long countered, however, that TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is required by Chinese law to make the app’s data available to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Chew testified Thursday about a new initiative called Project Texas to employ Oracle to store U.S. users' data on American soil.