Now, as TikTok’s chief government, he’s turn out to be the face of what some Washington lawmakers have claimed, with out proof, is a shadowy Chinese language spying and propaganda machine. When he takes the stand for his first congressional listening to Thursday, he’s more likely to face the grilling of a lifetime from lawmakers who argue that the app, now with 150 million U.S. customers, can’t be trusted and should be banned or bought.
Chew, a 40-year-old native of Singapore, has labored to counter American suspicions with arduous logic, telling members of Congress in one-on-one conferences that his firm is unaffiliated with the Chinese language authorities and is dedicated to constructing a “sunny nook of the web” for colourful movies and artistic speech.
“I don’t wish to go in and query anyone’s intentions. That’s not my job,” he mentioned in an interview final month on the firm’s WeWork suite close to Capitol Hill.
“We hear basic unrelated fears, analogies, associations that don’t make sense,” he added, “and for these, I believe the suitable strategy is to guarantee that we attain out to grasp: Is there something extra particular you’re speaking about? And the way can we deal with that?”
His allure offensive has run up in opposition to a closely polarized and surprisingly bipartisan resistance in Washington, the place tensions with the Chinese language authorities — and broader anxieties about social media and American kids — have made TikTok right into a political punching bag.
“The temperature is so excessive proper now,” mentioned Jim Lewis, director of the strategic applied sciences program on the Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research, a Washington assume tank. “I might not select this week to go to the Hill until you might have a dying want.”
Chew mentioned he’s working to beat the “belief deficit” that lawmakers have with not simply TikTok however any firm coming from China, the world’s second-deepest wellspring of tech innovation. His congressional testimony will in all probability be extensively watched by TikTok’s hundreds of thousands of American followers, its hundreds of U.S. staff and its buyers throughout the West, who fear {that a} U.S. authorities campaign may puncture its multibillion-dollar empire.
However even a persuasive efficiency by Chew is probably not sufficient. Biden administration officers, like Trump appointees earlier than them, have argued that TikTok must be bought to a U.S. purchaser to resolve nationwide safety considerations about how the app may funnel People’ information to the Chinese language authorities or increase Chinese language propaganda — two costs for which the USA has by no means offered proof, and which TikTok’s leaders have argued are speculative and improper.
Chew’s testimony may elevate uncomfortable questions on what occurs when American tech giants are not the dominant pressure behind what People see on-line. However it may additionally spotlight Washington’s rising curiosity in utilizing geopolitics to select winners and losers on the web — a problem with main penalties for the form of the longer term internet.
TikTok could also be simply the beginning. Of the Apple App Retailer’s 10 most-downloaded free apps in the USA, 4 are owned by Chinese language corporations, three of which rank above TikTok: PDD Holdings’ buying app Temu; the fast-fashion titan Shein; and one other ByteDance app, the video editor CapCut, which has greater than 200 million lively customers worldwide.
Jeffrey Towson, a former professor at Peking College’s Guanghua Faculty of Administration who now works as a tech advisor, mentioned Chew’s time at ByteDance coincides with China’s ascent on the worldwide web, together with the creation of the primary Chinese language-owned app People know and use.
“The concept a Chinese language social media firm may break into the U.S. in opposition to Fb and YouTube — that was a loopy thought again then, and now they’re all making an attempt to do it, however ByteDance was the primary,” Towson mentioned.
“TikTok is now the case research” for the way American lawmakers will reply, he added. “For those who give them the ability to ban social media corporations, you assume that is going to be the one time it occurs?”
‘Like every good start-up story’
Earlier than taking on TikTok in 2021, Chew adopted the form of top-tier company trajectory made potential by the globalization of recent tech.
He was born and raised in Singapore, the island nation in Southeast Asia that has turn out to be a outstanding bridge for worldwide enterprise between China and the West. He left to review economics at a London college, saying in an interview final yr that “the factor about rising up on a small island … is you get wanderlust at a really younger age.”
He moved to the USA to get his grasp’s diploma at Harvard Enterprise Faculty, assembly his spouse in California throughout a summer season internship whereas they have been each working at start-ups, he advised a Harvard alumni journal. Hers was at a clean-energy firm whereas his was at Fb, the then-ascendant social community that has since turn out to be TikTok’s bitter enemy.
Chew labored as an funding analyst at Goldman Sachs earlier than becoming a member of the Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner’s enterprise capital agency, DST International, recognized for its bets on main tech companies, together with Fb and Twitter. As a associate there, Chew helped coordinate one of many earliest investments in ByteDance by constructing relationships with its two younger founding engineers, Liang Rubo and Zhang Yiming. (Milner renounced his Russian citizenship final yr.)
“They acknowledged a possibility to construct a very good product individuals needed,” Chew mentioned at a DealBook convention late final yr. “I had the possibility to spend money on them, we grew to become associates, and slowly, like all good start-up story, the product grew larger and greater.”
Although recognized in the USA primarily for TikTok, ByteDance has over time turn out to be one of many world’s most dear software program factories, feverishly rolling out greater than 100 apps throughout classes starting from office communication (Lark) to video video games (“Cell Legends: Bang Bang”).
ByteDance’s first hit, the information app Toutiao, used a advice algorithm to personalize individuals’s feeds primarily based on their tastes and behaviors; the identical thought would drive TikTok to international stardom after it launched in 2017.
The Beijing-based firm now says it runs workplaces in almost 120 cities around the globe, together with Austin, Los Angeles, New York and Seattle. However its measurement and prominence have additionally landed it within the crosshairs of the Chinese language state: In 2018, after ByteDance was compelled to shut a comedy app that regulators had deemed “vulgar and improper,” the founders mentioned in an apologetic public letter that they’d work to make sure that communist values have been “broadcast to energy.”
In 2021, ByteDance employed Chew as its chief monetary officer, pulling him from one other Chinese language tech agency, the smartphone large Xiaomi, the place he had helped lead an preliminary public providing and announce new strains of pc displays.
By the point of his hiring, the Trump administration had already ordered the fast-growing app banned or bought to an American firm, and the Chinese language authorities had responded by declaring its expertise a strategic asset, blocking any potential sale.
Earlier than the Trump implosion, ByteDance employed Kevin Mayer, a Disney government who had helped launch its streaming community, as TikTok’s CEO, believing he’d assist develop TikTok’s international footprint. However when Mayer resigned after three months, citing a “sharply modified” political setting, the corporate elevated Chew into the position.
After years of claiming little about its negotiations with U.S. officers, TikTok has in latest months moved to extra aggressively inform its aspect of the story, saying it had for too lengthy ceded floor to critics who have been slamming the corporate with baseless claims.
Prime TikTok officers — in addition to ByteDance’s prime lawyer, the previous Microsoft government Erich Andersen — have performed in-depth briefings with journalists, researchers and policymakers. The corporate has additionally hosted press occasions at a TikTok “transparency middle” in Los Angeles, replete with museum-style reveals wherein journalists can evaluate how the app’s code and moderation techniques work.
Chew and his bosses at ByteDance have pushed the concept that they don’t seem to be so completely different from the tech entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. ByteDance’s founders have recorded movies of them touring their first Beijing house workplace, echoing the nostalgic mythmaking that executives at Apple and different tech corporations made in style by way of visits to previous San Francisco Bay Space dorm rooms and garages.
In a video from Washington posted Tuesday on the corporate’s TikTok account, Chew wore the cliche ensemble of American tech geeks — a blue hoodie and denims — and requested TikTokers to go away feedback about what they needed their elected representatives to know concerning the app. One of many prime feedback mentioned, “You already know one thing went improper when the boss has to point out up,” with a cry-laughing emoji.
Chew, a married father of two primarily based in Singapore, has spent a lot of the previous a number of weeks in Washington, working to personally meet with members of Congress — together with all of the members of the Home Power and Commerce Committee, earlier than which he’ll be testifying — to clarify the corporate’s place.
The corporate had been negotiating since 2019 with the Committee on International Funding in the USA, a cross-agency group referred to as CFIUS, on options to divestiture that might fulfill U.S. nationwide safety considerations.
In August, TikTok provided CFIUS a 90-page blueprint for a $1.5 billion restructuring plan that might give the U.S. authorities unimaginable leverage over TikTok’s American operations and open its information and algorithms to inspection by the American tech firm Oracle. Chew has referred to as the plan, referred to as Undertaking Texas, “an answer no different firm is making an attempt to pursue.”
However the Biden administration, which has mentioned nothing publicly concerning the proposal, has in latest weeks advised the corporate that it received’t accept mitigation efforts and desires ByteDance to dump its stake as a solution to sever any ties between TikTok and its Chinese language roots.
Although Undertaking Texas would sequester a lot of TikTok’s U.S. operation in a brand new entity whose leaders can be handpicked by the federal authorities, the app nonetheless depends on code and sources overseen by China-based managers and engineers. TikTok has mentioned it’ll push ahead on Undertaking Texas regardless.
Within the conferences, Chew has labored to supply technical particulars of Undertaking Texas and talked at size concerning the firm’s investments in kids’s security efforts and content material moderation, in line with individuals who have attended. He has referred to as on lawmakers to push for industry-wide rules that might maintain TikTok and its American rivals to the identical algorithm.
He has additionally urged them to assume previous the counter-lobbying of TikTok’s opponents, most notably Fb dad or mum firm Meta, which The Washington Publish first reported final yr had funded a nationwide media and lobbying marketing campaign designed to painting its rival as a generational risk.
Chew mentioned he intends to inform lawmakers through the listening to that the largely lighthearted leisure app now has greater than 150 million month-to-month lively customers in the USA — a 50 p.c acquire within the final two years — and {that a} ban would stomp on their speech freedoms and undermine People’ cultural cachet around the globe.
However he has additionally, with assist from a high-level preparatory crew inside TikTok, labored to metal himself for committee members’ responses, which in all probability will embody an onslaught of robust questions and moments designed to elicit viral sound bites.
Throughout TikTok’s final congressional look, in September, the corporate’s chief working officer, a former YouTube government named V Pappas, was pummeled by lawmakers, together with Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), who referred to as the corporate “a strolling safety nightmare.” Pappas mentioned in Los Angeles this month that a few of the lawmakers’ criticism is pushed by “xenophobia.”
Chew has labored to be outwardly diplomatic and understanding, telling The Publish that some members of Congress he met with in latest weeks had “some misunderstandings” however that they nonetheless had “the suitable to ask questions.”
However others inside the corporate have described the conferences with uncooked exasperation, saying a few of the most crucial lawmakers have been stubbornly misinformed or trafficked in unsubstantiated theories that the corporate is an arm of China’s Communist Occasion.
Some, they mentioned, have been receptive to their concepts in non-public however appeared all too blissful to assault the corporate when showing in a while nationwide TV. Some lawmakers have advised The Publish they left their conferences with Chew completely unconvinced: “I don’t assume there’s something they’ll say,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) mentioned final month.
Not like in additional conventional company hearings, the corporate has needed to go it alone: Its few allies in Washington embody NetChoice, a tech {industry} group of which it’s a member. Oracle executives have provided briefings by request to some lawmakers on how items of Undertaking Texas may work however haven’t spoken publicly in help.
One among TikTok’s few vocal congressional supporters, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) — who has 158,000 followers on the app — mentioned Tuesday that he would maintain a information convention with TikTok creators exterior the Capitol on the day earlier than the listening to about how the ban would undermine their free-speech rights.
Beneath Chew, the corporate has unveiled a set of options this month designed to neutralize a few of the commonest critiques of the corporate.
It introduced new screen-time restrictions for youngsters, who might be restricted to an hour a day until a dad or mum or guardian enters a particular bypass code — an echo of the same coverage adopted by Chinese language regulators. It additionally began permitting customers to reset the sorts of movies popping up on their essential “For You” feeds, serving to them extra immediately form the advice algorithm that its critics have mentioned is vulnerable to political meddling.
In conferences with Chew, lawmakers routinely argued that TikTok in the USA trafficked solely in viral nonsense whereas ByteDance’s China-only model of TikTok, referred to as Douyin, boosted movies devoted to training and enrichment. The corporate has typically argued that this declare is baseless, given {that a} fast search of TikTok in the USA yields hours of instructional movies, and has famous that China’s web makes use of paternalistic social guidelines and restrictions to form on-line content material in a approach that might run counter to American values.
Earlier this month, nevertheless, TikTok introduced that it could add tabs to its essential feeds in the USA devoted to instructional movies about science, expertise, engineering and math.
Chew, who has mentioned he likes studying about theoretical physics, has mentioned these are the sorts of movies that pop up on his TikTok feed, alongside stand-up comedy jokes and movies about golf.
The assertion is according to a lot of what Chew has advised lawmakers: that the TikTok they is likely to be so petrified of, and that they could by no means have checked out, is way extra innocent than they assume.
“I be taught quite a lot of stuff,” he mentioned with a smile. “Not everyone has had the possibility to make use of our platform, proper?”
Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.
clarification
The Russia-born billionaire Yuri Milner renounced his Russian citizenship final yr.
