The video features an interview with TikTok's CEO, Shou Chu, who discusses various aspects of the company, including its growth and strategic decisions. It opens with Shou Chu's personal journey from an intern at Facebook to leading TikTok, emphasizing the scale of the platform's success. The conversation quickly shifts to address national security concerns associated with TikTok, particularly the Bipartisan attention it has received in the US due to potential data access by the Chinese government.

Shou Chu elaborates on TikTok's efforts to address these concerns through Project Texas, which aims to localize user data within secure third-party cloud Infrastructure managed by US residents. He stresses the independence of TikTok's algorithms from China and details the company's corporate organization, which includes significant global investment. Chu also addresses questions about content moderation, adolescent safety, and the distinction between TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Douyin.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. Bipartisan [ˌbaɪˈpɑːrtɪzən] - (adj.) - Involving the agreement or cooperation of two political parties that usually oppose each other's policies.

But there seems to be some Bipartisan agreement around TikTok and what is perceived as the danger of it.

2. Verification [ˌverɪfɪˈkeɪʃn] - (n.) - The process of establishing the truth, accuracy, or validity of something.

The problem that we have really requires third party Verification, and it requires Transparency.

3. Algorithm [ˈælɡəˌrɪðəm] - (n.) - A process or set of rules to be followed in calculations or other problem-solving operations, especially by a computer.

One of the things, though, that people wonder about is the Algorithm, the famous Algorithm.

4. Transparency [trænsˈpær.əns.i] - (n.) - The characteristic of being easy to see through or detect.

And we want to make it very transparent so you can keep your eye on that report to see the kind of requests that we are disclosing.

5. Protocols [ˈproʊtəˌkɔlz] - (n.) - Established procedures or systems of rules governing affairs of state or diplomatic occurrences.

We have Rigorous data access protocols such that only a team made up of US residents can have access to that US data.

6. Misinformation [ˌmɪsɪnˈfɔːrmeɪʃn] - (n.) - False or inaccurate information, especially that which is deliberately intended to deceive.

These are things like no pornography, no violence, no Misinformation.

7. Ubiquity [juːˈbɪk.wɪ.ti] - (n.) - The fact of appearing everywhere or of being very common.

As our platform achieves Ubiquity and is loved by millions of people in this country, you're going to see all sorts of views appear on the platform.

8. Localization [ˌləʊkələˈzeɪʃ(ə)n] - (n.) - The process of adapting something to meet the language, cultural, and other requirements of a specific local market.

But increasingly in the future, we expect data localization to be a theme.

9. Pervasively [pərˈveɪː.sɪv.li] - (adv.) - Existing in or spreading through every part of something.

Should this exist for kids who are under 13 at all?

10. Entrench [ɪnˈtrɛntʃ] - (v.) - Establish (an attitude, habit, or belief) so firmly that change is very difficult or unlikely.

We have a differentiated experience if you are below 18 on the platform.

Navigating TikTok's Path Amid Global Security Concerns

Please welcome Andrew Ross Sorkin and his guest, the CEO of TikTok, Sho Chu. Shou Chu is here. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us coming all the way here to spend some time with us this afternoon as we try to better understand TikTok amid all of the headlines, as you know so well, that include national security issues, which we talked about here this morning with the treasury secretary, as well as the world of creators and what TikTok is going to be and what you want it to be.

I want to start, if we could just with a little bit of your own personal background, because more than a decade ago, you were an intern at Facebook. Yes, I was, interestingly enough. And you were a student at Harvard Business School. And I just wonder if you ever imagined that you were going to end up running their now biggest competitor. Well, the short answer is no, absolutely not. So I'm Sho. I'm from Singapore. I'm very jet lagged because I flew from Singapore and it's 20 hours away. I'm a father of two. I'm 40 years old. And about ten years ago, I was in China, and I met with two young entrepreneurs, two young engineers, and they were starting a company. They recognized an opportunity to build a good product that people wanted, started building a product. I had a chance to invest in them and became friends. And slowly, like any good startup story, the product grew bigger and bigger, and today it's become the size of TikTok and whatever we have today. So that's been a journey. It's been unbelievable. I couldn't have imagined ten years ago that it would be of this scale today.

Let's go straight, if we could, to sort of the large headline that I think it is, perhaps the cloud that's over TikTok here in the US, to try to understand how you think about it, because there is not a lot of Bipartisan support for most things here in the US, as you know. But there seems to be some Bipartisan agreement around TikTok and what is perceived as the danger of it. And this idea that it is ultimately controlled by the Chinese and therefore the Chinese government, what is that? When you hear that headline, what do you think?

I think, first of all, that we take all these concerns very seriously. We have been studying them, and for the last couple of years, we've been working with CFIUS and with our engineers to try and solve what we think is a very solvable problem. The problem that we have really requires third party Verification, and it requires Transparency. And the solution that we have built that you must have read about. This is called Project Texas. That's the project name internally. And the idea is that we will take the data that you have in Virginia and in Singapore, where TikTok user data is stored today, move it into a third party cloud Infrastructure. And in this case, we have chosen Oracle to be our partner because they have strong capabilities and security.

They are providing software assurances as well to the code that's inside. And we have Rigorous data access protocols such that only a team made up of us residents can have access to that us data. So again, it's a solvable problem. Now, we have built what I think is an unprecedented solution to try and solve this problem. It's extremely expensive to build, it's incredibly challenging to do it, but that's a commitment to addressing some of these concerns.

Let me ask you this. So this is FBI leader Chris Wray to the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he's, quote, extremely concerned that under Chinese law, Chinese companies are required to do whatever the Chinese government wants them to do in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government. What happens in the reality behind the scenes in terms of how this actually works or happens?

So the FBI director, through his team, through CFIUS, has access to the discussions and the plans that we are building to solve and address this problem. And I'm very confident that this will address the concerns that he has raised. Now, for us, no foreign government has asked us for us user data before. Really? They haven't. And if they did, we would say no. We have a Transparency report that we publish every quarter like most other consumer Internet companies. And in that report, we spell out the details of the various data requests that various governments around the world have asked of the citizens of their country. And we want to make it very transparent so you can keep your eye on that report to see the kind of requests that we are disclosing.

One of the things, though, that people wonder about is the Algorithm, the famous Algorithm. I want to get into how well that Algorithm works, but the idea that you can separate the Algorithm and the technology completely and utterly in the United States versus having to be somehow connected to China, the Algorithm is separate. Today. The code is also separate at this point in time. It's machine learning. So the Algorithm is trained by input. And TikTok doesn't operate in China. TikTok operates here in the US, operates in many other countries around the world. And that's the input that is training the Algorithm. So the Algorithm is very separate. So our understanding that the original Algorithm was a Bytedance Algorithm, you think is old news. This is definitely very outdated. There is some original code. I think that's what you meant. There's some original code, but the code has been split up ages ago.

How much influence and power do you think you have at the company? And the reason I ask is, there's actually a New York Times article that raised this very question. And the argument was that, effectively, you are at the behest of the folks at Bytedance, and therefore at the behest of the Chinese government. I am responsible for all the strategic decisions at TikTok. But I do want to explain by dance, because you raised it, it is organized the way you would expect an Internet company to be organized. About half our investors on the cap table are global investors, folks like Carlyle, Blackrock, General Atlantic. We have a board made up of shareholder representatives. So, for example, a representative from General Atlantic, from Sequoia, from Kotu, and from SIG, which is a financial software firm, a very early investor in the company. They constitute the board, together with Ruble, who represents their employees. So it is organized exactly what you would expect an Internet technology company to be organized. And for me, I am responsible for the decisions at TikTok, but ultimately, I have to be responsible to the shareholders and to the board as well.

So what are we supposed to make? There have been reports that there were Chinese who had access, maybe not us consumers, but others along the way. Access to what? Access to accounts. Well, first of all, we have very Rigorous data access protocols, just like any other consumer Internet company in the past. Data access is organized by requirement. Every company does this, including some of the companies you interviewed today. What this means is that if you're an engineer and you have a global talent pool and you require access to some data to build a part of your product, you have to request that access and is based on requirement. There's a strict protocol. Do you need it or not? If you do, requirement is granted. Access is granted. Nobody organizes this by nationality. Nobody goes this nationality, that, nationality. Nobody organizes it like that. But that's in the past. In the future, we're going to organize it the way I just described it. We're going to move the data to the Oracle cloud Infrastructure, and only a team of us residents are going to have access to that data. This is, again, like I said, a solution that no other company is trying to pursue.

You made an interesting comment about the us version of TikTok being very different than the chinese version. Effectively, the us version is different from the UK version. But let me ask you this. The chinese version, you could argue, is censored. Do you agree with that? Douyin has to follow Chinese. Douyin is the chinese company that has the short video product. Douin has to follow Chinese media laws.

And so when you think about those media laws and then you think about what you're doing here in the US, one of the things that those media laws are trying to do, for example, is to prevent children from getting addicted to scrolling on TikTok. In the US, that doesn't exist. Should it? First of all, we take minor safety extremely seriously. One of the first things I did when I took on this role was to make sure that minus safety is at the top of the list in terms of safety and priority of the company.

Now, I also want to describe how the platform actually works. Please. It's user generated content. So the content that you're going to see is generated by users here in the US and in the UK and other places where TikTok operates, we do have rules. The way TikTok works is that we do have about 13 rules. We call these rules community guidelines. It's published on our website. You can go have a look. And these are rules on what content we allow and disallow on the platform. These are things like no pornography, no violence, no Misinformation. And we built our trust and safety team to take these roles, build policies around them, and Operationalize it so that we can go through all the content and remove the violating content. So that's the way the platform works.

So far, you've managed to, I don't think you were keeping it from happening, but the way the site is designed, you're not really in the news business yet. There's not a lot of news, if you will, on TikTok. Do you ever think, are you on TikTok? I am. See, so we have news, but do you see over time, I mean, a lot of the issues, frankly, and we talked about Mark Zuckerberg earlier, that he has struggled with, that Elon Musk is contending with, relates to the news business, relates to information in a different way. I think every company has a different mission. Every company is different. The mission that we have is to inspire creativity and to bring joy. And the product that we have built is a product that is built to fulfill this mission. So that means that. Does news content inspire creativity? Yes. Does it bring joy? Yes. And that's the kind of content that we have built our product to try and optimize for.

But are you starting to see more political. There will be content, and people talk about the presidential election of 2024. I mean, how much do you think about that? And then all of the information or Misinformation or, you know, we're talking with Mark Zuckerberg about deep. There was a deep fake of him. There are various topics here on Misinformation. It violates our guidelines. So we do have a very significant, large investment in making sure that we're tackling Misinformation. So that is one of the guidelines that's very dear to us. In terms of political content, we don't actually accept political ads. And as far as I know, we are the only platform of our scale that doesn't allow that because we don't think that this necessarily helps us fulfill our mission. Does it inspire creativity? Does it bring joyous? So we've decided that political ads are not necessarily for us. If anyone wants to come and express their view, as long as it doesn't violate the 13 guidelines that we've laid down, you can express whatever view you want. And you're going to see, as our platform achieves Ubiquity and is loved by millions of people in this country, you're going to see all sorts of views appear on the platform.

What do you think of the metaverse? I think it's too early to tell. Do you imagine ever investing in that space? I think new technology is that technology is fascinating, and you can imagine interesting and useful use cases in the metaverse. But at the same time, where we are in terms of the adoption curve is so early that I think we need to proportionately give it that sort of weight in terms of investments. And of course, with any of these new formats and technology, we pay a lot of attention to it. But our assessment is that it's still quite early at this point in time.

What do you think about. We've talked about it practically now at every session. What do you think about a TikTok? I'm sorry, you are TikTok. I think it's great. What do you think about Twitter and what's happening there? I'm following the news like, I guess all of us on Twitter. Are you on Twitter? I am on Twitter. I'm following the news as well. I think. Look, Elon is a very successful entrepreneur. He's making changes at the company. I think it's too early to tell what the changes will lead to, but we're paying a lot of attention.

Are you surprised that all those advertisers aren't staying on the platform. I don't know the details of what the conversation is there, but I do think that platforms need to invest in trust and safety. I think platform safety is something that's incredibly important.

So you have two kids? I do. Do they use TikTok? No, they're too young for that. So what ages are they? Eight and six. TikTok is here in the US. If you're below the ages of. If you're below 13, you get a very restricted version of TikTok. And in many other countries around the world, we don't allow users who are below 13, even if you are a teenager. We have invested in a lot of tools for the parents of the teenagers to be able to have more control of the experience that the teenage children are having. We've also invested a significant amount in understanding the issues that could arise from teenage youth and making sure we're investing enough to address those concerns as well. Now, if you're a parent here and your teenage child is on TikTok, go to settings. There's family pairing. Click on it. It's going to give you a lot of tools to manage your teenager's experience.

What do you think a reasonable amount of time is that people should spend on TikTok? I think people should have freedom to spend as much time as they want on anything, to be honest. But as far as I know, we were the first platform to start pushing out messages. If you spend too much time on a platform. So it depends on your age, it depends on the time of the day. I'm not sure how many of you use TikTok here. Okay, I think you got a lot of. There's Wi Fi, by the way, for those who haven't. You can find it on the app stores, any app store. Where was I? If you. Yeah. Depending on your age and depending on the time of the day, we will send you messages to tell you to get off the platform. So if you hit one of those messages, that's us telling you, what's the limit there, then? There is no hard limit, per se, but once you cross a certain amount of time, again, depending on the time of day, we will start telling you, look, maybe it's time to get out.

I know it's a secret sauce, but can you tell us how the Algorithm actually works? Because I think everybody. I mean. No, no. It's fascinating how frequently it is sending you stuff that you want to see and whether that's a good thing. By the way, it's just math. That's what it is. The way the machine learning Algorithm works is that it takes all your behavioral signals, which is built into your own experience using the app. For example, how long you stay on a video, how quickly you swipe it, do you share it, do you comment, do you like it? It takes those behavioral signals, it organizes it mathematically, and it matches it with content that matches with your behavior. And through that, we give you, we give you, we recommend the content, the machine recommends the content to you. To your question, there's also dispersion mechanisms so that you're not seeing the same thing all the time. Of course there is.

When you think, though, about what this is going to be in the future, what do you want it to be? I mean, if we were talking five years from now, is this an entertainment company? Is it a media platform? A social media platform? What is this? I go back to the mission of the company, which is to inspire creativity and to bring joy. Now, the creativity that we mean here is not the narrow definition of just creating a short video. What we are hoping to achieve is to unleash human creativity through connecting people and through discovery of new information.

The way we want to do it is we want to provide three things to our users. We want to provide a window to discover the for you page. If you open the app, the first thing that you see looks like a window. And the recommendation Algorithm helps you discover new content. So that's the window. It's like, think of it as a window to explore in a whole new world. We then want to provide a canvas for you to create, and the canvas is for you to, through our investments in all these effects and filters and generation capabilities, allow you to publish and express yourself. And of course, we have the guidelines that we talked about to make sure that it remains a safe environment so that you can feel very safe to publish content and inspire others.

And the last thing is bridges to connect people. And this is really fascinating, because what we have discovered over time is that through our app, people have discovered their communities. It can be very trivial. Like if you're a dog lover, you're going to see a lot of dogs. If you don't like cats, you're not going to see cats. If you're a cat lover, you're going to see a lot of cats. But it could also be important things like there's something called book talk. Are you aware of it? I do know about book talk. Book talk? Last time I checked, 70 billion views globally. It's a movement where people post about their favorite books. And I read somewhere that it's become one of the most important trends that's causing young people to read more, which I think is great. It's given a voice to a lot of minority authors who never had their voice before. It's about discovering. It's about connecting people and finding the community you have.

And some people build businesses around this. I've methemeral. I met this guy. His name is Brian. Brian moved from New York to Tennessee. I met him in Nashville. He used to be a photographer. During COVID he just. He was sick of living in the city because it was lockdowns. So he moved to Nashville, and he started farming. And through that, through posting on TikTok, he discovered a community of people like him, you know, sort of urban dwellers who have discovered this urge to reconnect with nature and farm. And through this, he's built a proper business. He's selling his agricultural products on TikTok right now. And I think it's great. It's about bridges that we are providing to connect people together. And you have millions of these stories all around the country every day.

I do want to open up to questions, and we only got a couple more minutes, and I see a hand. I see Bill Ackman, actually, right there in the middle. If we can get a microphone to Bill, that would be great. And then we'll try to get around the rest of the room as quickly as we can.

So I think TikTok is an amazing product and company, and it sounds like you care a lot about the content that's served in the product. But I'm aware of some sort of personal tragedies that come from people who spent time on TikTok. So, for example, a lot of young women, in particular, young girls, have eating disorders that came about as a result of content on TikTok were bad. It's hard for me to speak because of the echo. So that's one example. Another example is teenage vaping, for example, where promotion of teenage vaping as a way to lose weight or as something that's cool, etcetera. How do you think about moderating that kind of content, which is not pornography, it's not on your list of issues, but really can cause profound harm.

First of all, as a father of two children myself, whenever I hear about these tragedies, it's heartbreaking. A lot of these trends that you talked about have existed before our platform existed. But I think we have a responsibility to invest more to make sure that any of these trends or any of these type of content that is not suitable for young people is given the right amount of investment to be moderated off the platform. We have a differentiated experience if you are below 18 on the platform. And I think a lot more investment needs to go into that to stay ahead of our growth.

Go ahead, sir. Hello. Oh, there we go. You're good. Thank you, Andrew, for picking a longtime fan. I also just arrived from Asia. Actually, we might be the only two coming from Asia. I'm coming from Vietnam. I also actually own a media company that has the same license as TikTok in Vietnam. TikTok's the only major platform to actually have an office in Vietnam. Facebook doesn't or meta. Google doesn't. They operate from Singapore, mostly for data reasons. Which just leads me to my question. We're talking a lot about us data privacy and users. How do you guys operate in other countries? A country like Vietnam, which is 100 million people, it's one of the largest markets for TikTok. Today, all the TikTok user data is stored in Virginia and in Singapore. But increasingly in the future, we expect data localization to be a theme. I think data security is important. Some of these concerns raise are concerns that we have looked into deeply. And I think we are a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of investing in data localization. And I think in the future, of course, it's not going to be in every single country, but data belonging to certain regions are going to be localized in that region. I think this is a long term trend.

I think we have one more question here. It's the finale. Maggie. Hi, Maggie Wilderotter. Thank you so much for being here. One of the questions I had was based upon what you just spoke about. You mentioned a number of countries that they are able to have kids, watch TikTok, and experience it at 13. But you said in the United States, there's an exception, like a different app that takes it down into younger children. Why do you do that? In the US? It is a legal requirement. It is a legal requirement to provide, to. Not to provide people below a certain age, in this case, under 13 different apps. So you will see, this is why all consumer apps have an under 13 experience in the US.

I'm sorry. I think what she's asking, it's actually very interesting, is why have the app at all? I have 212 year old boys who actually are in this room, by the way, right now. They have used TikTok, guys. I don't know where they are. Where are they? Right over here, guys. And they didn't lie about their age. You definitely didn't. Maybe he did. He says, I don't know if that's on me or not, but what do you think of that? Just the idea that should this exist for kids who are under 13 at all? I can share more details with you offline, but this is a legal requirement in the United States, yes. Just to help end this piece of the conversation. I guess the question is, I know that you said it's a legal requirement that kids under 13 have to have a different app, effectively, but I guess the question is, do they have to have an app at all? Could you limit it so that the kids couldn't have access to it? Is it something you'd ever think about? The last time I checked, no. The answer is no. In terms of the legal requirement. Doesn't allow me to do this, but I can get back to you on this.

Okay, final question, just for all of us old folk who don't know any better, who should we be following on TikTok? Oh, please follow me. I only have 10,000 followers, so please follow me. Follow Andrew as well. I'm sure he's going to. I'm sure he's great. Thank you very, very much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. Thank you.

Technology, Global, Leadership, Social Media, Project Texas, Data Security