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Chew said in a video posted on TikTok early Tuesday the app now
has more than 150 million active monthly U.S. users. "That's
almost half the U.S. coming to TikTok," Chew said. TikTok in
2020 said it had 100 million U.S. users.
Chew, who will testify Thursday before the House Energy and
Commerce Committee, said: "Some politicians have started talking
about banning TikTok."
"Now this could take TikTok away from all 150 million of you,"
he said in the video that features the U.S. Capitol in the
background.
He asked TikTok users to leave comments about what they wanted
U.S. lawmakers to know about "what you love about TikTok."
Chew also said 5 million U.S. businesses use TikTok to reach
customers.
TikTok's critics fear its U.S. user data could be passed on to
China's government by the app, which is owned by the Chinese
tech company ByteDance. TikTok rejects the spying allegations.
TikTok also said Tuesday it had updated its community use
guidelines and offered more details of its plans to secure the
data of U.S. users. The company said it had started to delete
this month U.S. user protected data in data centers in Virginia
and Singapore after it started routing new U.S. data to the
Oracle Cloud last year.
Last week, TikTok said the Biden administration demanded that
TikTok's Chinese owners divest their stake in the app or it
could face a U.S. ban.
TikTok, which has said it has spent more than $1.5 billion on
rigorous data security efforts, said "if protecting national
security is the objective, divestment doesn't solve the problem:
a change in ownership would not impose any new restrictions on
data flows or access."
A growing number of U.S. lawmakers support a ban on TikTok. This
includes Energy and Commerce Committee chair Cathy McMorris
Rodgers, congressional aides told reporters on a call Monday. On
Friday, six more U.S. senators backed bipartisan legislation to
give Biden new powers to ban TikTok.
On March 1, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted along
party lines to give President Joe Biden new powers to ban TikTok.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Andrew Heavens and
Jane Merriman)
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