TikTok Chief Executive Shou Zi Chew will appear before the U.S. Energy and Commerce Committee in March, reported Reuters.
Shou Zi Chew will testify before the committee on March 23, which will be his first appearance before a congressional committee.
The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to hold a vote next month on a bill aimed at blocking the use of TikTok in the United States over national security concerns.
According to committee representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, ByteDance-owned TikTok “has knowingly allowed the ability for the Chinese Communist Party to access American user data.”
The company denied the accusations and assured that "the Chinese Communist Party has neither direct nor indirect control of ByteDance or TikTok."
For three years, TikTok – which has more than 100 million U.S. users – has been seeking to assure Washington that the personal data of U.S. citizens cannot be accessed and its content cannot be manipulated by China’s Communist Party or anyone else under Beijing’s influence.
Maria Belyaeva, an expert of the BRICS Competition Centre, notes:
"A fairer solution does not seem to be a point-by-point ban on suspicious applications, but rather the introduction by the U.S. of a stricter but universal compliance mechanism, as has been done for Chinese companies trading on U.S. exchanges.”
Maria Belyaeva thinks that if the U.S. makes specific demands, Bytedance will certainly try to meet them so as not to lose a large market, and TikTok will not be blocked. However, if negotiations are unconstructive and boil down to mutual accusations, the Chinese platform could face sanctions.
Earlier in January, TikTok's CEO met with European officials to assure them that the app would respect the bloc's increasingly stringent tech rules and commitments to privacy and child safety.
