TikTok听证会周受资六分钟自我陈述

• Our witness today is Mr. Sho Chu, Chief Executive Officer of TikTok.
• TikTok has over a billion monthly active users worldwide.
• Safety for teenagers is a top priority, with innovative measures in place.
• Concerns regarding national security and data security are taken seriously.
• TikTok is committed to transparency, accountability, and user protection.

Our witness today is Mr. Sho Chu, Chief Executive Officer of TikTok. You're recognized for five minutes. Thank you.

Chair Rogers, Ranking Member Pane, members of the committee, thank you for your time. I am Sho Chi and I'm from Singapore. That's why I was born as for my parents and after serving in Singapore's military I moved to the UK to attend college and then here to the US to attend business school. I actually met my wife here by the way, she was just born a few miles away from here in Virginia.

Two years ago I became the CEO of TikTok. Today we have more than a billion monthly active users around the world, including over 150 million in the United States. Our app is a place where people can be creative and curious, and we're close to 5 million American businesses, mostly small businesses, who go to find new customers and to fuel their growth.

As TikTok has grown, we've tried to learn the lessons of companies that have come before us, especially when it comes to the safety of teenagers. While the vast majority of people on TikTok are over 18, one of our fastest growing demographics are people over 35. We spent a lot of time adopting measures to protect teenagers. Many of those measures are firsts for the social media industry.

We forbid direct messaging for people under 16 and we have a 16-minute watch time by default for those under 18. We have a suite of family pairing tools so that parents can participate in their teens' experience and make the choices that are right for their family. We want TikTok to be a place where teenagers can come to learn, which is why we recently launched a feed that exclusively features educational videos about STEM. STEM videos already have over 116 billion views on TikTok and I think TikTok is inspiring a new generation to discover a passion for math and science.

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. It is a private company. 60% 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. TikTok itself is not available in mainland China. We are headquartered in Los Angeles and in Singapore and we have 7,000 employees in the US today.

Still, we have heard important concerns about the potential for unwanted foreign access to U.S. data and potential manipulation of the TikTok U.S. ecosystem. Our approach has never been to dismiss or trivialize any of these concerns. We have addressed them with real action. Now that's what we have been doing for the last two years: building what amounts to a firewall.

The seals of protected US user data from unauthorized foreign access. The bottom line is American data stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel. We call this initiative Project Texas. That's why Oracle is headquartered today. US TikTok data is stored by default in Oracle service. Only vetted personnel operating in a new company called TikTok US data security can control access to this data. Additionally, we have plans for this company to report to an independent American board with strong security credentials.

Now there's still some work to do. We have legacy US data sitting in our service in Virginia and in Singapore. We are deleting those and we expect that to be complete this year. When that is done, all protected US data will be under the protection of US law and under the control of the US-led security team. This eliminates the concern that some of you have shared with me. The TikTok user data can be subject to Chinese law.

This goes further, by the way, than what any other company in our industry has done. We will also provide unprecedented transparency and security for the source code for the TikTok app and recommendation engine. Third-party validators like Oracle and others will review and validate our source code and algorithms. This will help ensure the integrity of the code that powers what Americans see on our app. We will further provide access to researchers which helps them study and monitor our content ecosystem.

We believe we are the only company that offers this level of transparency. Trust is about actions we take. We have to earn that trust with decisions we make for our company and our products. The potential security, privacy, and content manipulation concerns raised about TikTok are really not unique to us. The same issues apply to other companies.

We believe what is needed are clear transparent rules that apply broadly to all tech companies. Ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns.

Now, as I conclude, there are more than 150 million Americans who love our platform and we know we have a responsibility to protect them. Which is why I am making the following commitments to you and to all our users:

1. We will keep safety, particularly for teenagers, as a top priority for us.
2. We will firewall protected US data from unwanted foreign access.
3. TikTok will remain a place for free expression and will not be manipulated by any government.
4. We will be transparent and will give access to third-party independent monitors to remain accountable for our commitments.

I'll be grateful for any feedback that you have, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you very much.