🎧 Listen: In today’s episode of The Journal podcast, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew discusses the app's data safeguards in an exclusive interview with WSJ's stuwoo, who describes meeting the executive for a rare conversation
This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.Stu Woo: It was a big deal. I mean, he's done very few interviews since he became CEO two years ago.Stu Woo: He was wearing, I guess, the modern 40 year old tech CEO uniform. It was like a plain white t-shirt, a little bit oversized, but with a close-fitting blazer on top and jeans and sneakers.
Stu Woo: Yeah, I had a college classmate from Singapore and he said, at the end of military training, survival training, you're like starving in the jungle for five days. They give you a live quail. And what my college classmate did was he killed it with his bare hands, skinned it, and then cooked it and ate it. So I wanted to know what Shou, the TikTok CEO did, in the same situation.Stu Woo: He didn't seem to want to directly address it.
Stu Woo: I mean, he survived survival trading. I don't know whether TikTok's going to survive what the US government has in store for them. Ryan Knutson: The US government is concerned that this Chinese law could compel TikTok to hand over data about its more than 150 million American users. Ryan Knutson: A spokesman for China's foreign ministry has said that it believes the US government is spreading misinformation about TikTok and is using national security as a pretense to hobble a foreign company. These concerns about TikTok in the US aren't new.
Ryan Knutson: The other thing Project Texas would do is give Oracle, an American company, access to TikTok's video recommendation algorithm. Ryan Knutson: Shou said the company's spending so much that it's preventing TikTok from being profitable. Despite all this, lawmakers still aren't happy. There's a new push to ban TikTok.Ryan Knutson: And Shou has come to Washington DC to defend the company.
Stu Woo: Starts off being a few Republicans, like Senator Marco Rubio, calling for this. Then more and more senators and Congress members join on, including some Democrats, which I think is a key turning point because now the folks who want to ban TikTok say, "This isn't a Democratic or Republican issue. This is an American national security issue."
Stu Woo: Right. I think TikTok feels like they're in a position of proving a negative, and they do point out that, they say explicitly, "The Chinese government has never asked us to spy or do anything like that. And if they asked us, we would say no."
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