TikTok CEO to testify before Congress in March as US weighs ban

TikTok's top executive will testify before Congress for the first time in March as the U.S. considers whether to ban the Chinese-made app.

CEO Shou Zi Chew will appear before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on March 23, the Wall St. Journal reported Monday. Chew will be the sole witness at the hearing, giving skeptical Republicans ample time to question his company and its deep ties to China.

"TikTok has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data," Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., who chairs the committee, told WSJ. "Americans deserve to know how these actions impact their privacy and data security, as well as what actions TikTok is taking to keep our kids safe from online and offline harms."

TikTok is a massively popular video-sharing app owned by the Chinese tech company ByteDance. China's laws require its tech companies to share their data with the government whenever asked, leading to widespread concern that the app is turning over data on Americans.

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TikTok has stated that it will never share any of its data with the Chinese government, however. It has also put forward a plan to house its data on American users in separate servers based in the U.S.

The plan also involves TikTok granting U.S. officials – namely the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) – oversight of its algorithms.

The social media platform has already spent $1.5 billion on the reorganization of its U.S. operations so far. TikTok argues the revamp and added oversight will ensure U.S. user data would not be accessible to its Chinese parent company and, therefore, will be shielded from the Communist Chinese Party (CCP).

Nevertheless, many U.S. lawmakers and officials say America shouldn't take any chances. Multiple lawmakers have already put forward legislation banning the app outright, as former President Donald Trump threatened to do.

"I don’t believe there is a path forward for anything other than a ban," FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr said last year, adding that there is not "a world in which you could come up with sufficient protection on the data that you could have sufficient confidence that it’s not finding its way back into the hands of the CCP."

TikTok pushed back on Carr in a statement to FOX Business, arguing that the commissioner has no role in discussions with the CFIUS. The FCC has no authority to regulate TikTok, which is why Carr and others critical of Chinese apps have urged other federal agencies and Congress to take action.

"Commissioner Carr has no role in the confidential discussions with the U.S. government related to TikTok and appears to be expressing views independent of his role as an FCC commissioner," TikTok responded. "We are confident that we are on a path to reaching an agreement with the U.S. Government that will satisfy all reasonable national security concerns."

While TikTok representatives have insisted that users' data are safe, executives for the company have admitted under oath that the data is accessible from China.

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That access is used frequently as well, as was revealed in an extensive report from BuzzFeed in 2022. The outlet obtained audio from more than 80 internal meetings at TikTok, showing that U.S. employees were not permitted to access user data and instead relied on Chinese employees to do so.

Fox News' Breck Dumas contributed to this report.