Shou Zi Chew, center, with the CEO and senior vice-president of Xiaomi in 2018. Chew was an early investor in ByteDance, founded in 2012, before it began to develop short-form video apps, according to an interview with David Rubenstein, the founder of the private investment firm and ByteDance investor the Carlyle Group. Though Chew has not formally worked at TikTok for very long, he has been involved with its parent company since its early days. TikTok was seeing explosive growth, boasting 150 million users just in the US, but also increased regulatory pressure over potential ties to the Chinese government. The now seven-year-old company had already gone through two CEOs in just one year – Kevin Mayer, who ran the company for three months, and Vanessa Pappas, who served as a temporary global head before Chew replaced her. Regulatory pressure growsīy the time Chew took over in May 2021, he had his work cut out for him. The company also recently announced it was limiting screen time for its under-18 users to one hour.īut it’s unclear how much he stands to change lawmakers’ minds, especially as bipartisan efforts to appear tough on China gain momentum, making it difficult for him to find allies in either party. TikTok says it spent more than $1.5bn on security efforts and started the process of deleting the US user data that was backed up to its storage centers in Virginia and Singapore after it started routing all US traffic through Oracle-owned servers in the US. Over the past year, the company has attempted to address some lawmakers’ concerns about both data security and teen mental health. ![]() It’s one of the biggest tests yet for the Harvard business alumnus, who counts stints at the consumer electronics giant Xiaomi, Yuri Milner’s investment firm DST and Goldman Sachs on his résumé, and has only been in the TikTok job since May 2021. In the past few months alone, the US has banned TikTok on federal government devices, following similar moves by multiple states’ governments, and the Biden administration has threatened a national ban unless its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, sells its shares. The stakes are high, coming amid a crackdown on TikTok in the US to Europe. ![]() On Thursday Chew will appear before a US congressional committee, answering to lawmakers’ concerns over the Chinese government’s access to US user data, as well as TikTok’s impact on the mental health of its younger user base. But his influence over one of the world’s fastest-growing, most popular and – some say – most dangerous social networks is under increasing scrutiny. ![]() Suffice to say, Chew is not an influencer.
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