TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew explains how US knowledge might be stored out of China

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew gave a uncommon public interview at The New York Times’ DealBook convention at present, telling host Andrew Ross Sorkin that he’s “responsible for all the strategic decisions at TikTok” in response to a query about interference from the Chinese authorities.

The 40-year-old Chew was humorous and relaxed for a lot of the interview, even when a lot of his solutions sounded straight from the 2010s Zuckerberg / Dorsey social-networking-is-good-for-the-world playbook. Did you already know TikTok allows folks to specific themselves and construct communities round shared pursuits? Chew is especially pleased with booktok, a hashtag neighborhood with over 70 billion views that has turn out to be a drive within the publishing trade. But requested a query concerning the unfavorable affect TikTok may need on younger ladies, he demurred. (Actually, that’s straight from the early 2010s Instagram playbook as effectively.)

At the identical time, Chew was ready and prepared for questions on Chinese interference in TikTok, whose possession by China-based ByteDance has brought on requires the app to be banned on either side of the aisle. “We take all these concerns seriously, we study them, we have been working with [the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] to solve what we think is a very solvable problem,” he stated to Sorkin.

The answer is “Project Texas,” wherein TikTok will transfer its knowledge from Virginia and Singapore to a brand new cloud infrastructure within the United States run by Oracle, the place solely a staff fabricated from up of US residents could have entry. The system is “expensive to build, and it’s challenging to do it, but we are doing it to address these concerns,” Chew stated.

“We are ahead of the curve on data localization,” Chew stated. “No company organizes data like this.”

He adopted up by saying the true answer is transparency and highlighted the corporate’s transparency studies, saying “no foreign government has asked us for user data before, and if they did we would say no.”

Chew touched on just a few extra subjects, noting that the famed TikTok algorithm is “just math” that recommends content material based mostly on consumer indicators like watch time and engagement, and that the algorithm within the United States is already totally different than the algorithm in China as a result of the totally different consumer teams work together in a different way. He additionally touched on Elon Musk’s funding in Twitter, saying that “Elon is a very successful entrepreneur,” however that “it’s too early to tell” what is going to occur subsequent. He did provide a degree of disagreement, although, saying that “platform safety is incredibly important” and that “platforms need to invest in trust and safety,” in sharp distinction to Elon’s culling of these groups at Twitter.

“We have a responsibility to invest more to make sure that any trends and content not suitable for young people is moderated off the platform,” Chew stated, additional suggesting the mother and father within the viewers arrange the monitoring settings on their youngsters’ TikTok accounts.

Chew additionally famous TikTok is the one platform at its scale which doesn’t settle for political adverts, saying that they don’t fill the corporate’s mission of inspiring creativity and creating pleasure. “We don’t think political ads do this,” he stated to laughter from the viewers.