A nearly six-hour grilling of TikTok's CEO by U.S. lawmakers on Thursday brought the platform's 150 million U.S. users no closer to an answer whether the app should be wiped from their devices.

The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing came after the Biden Administration indicated it may ban the app outright in the U.S. if its Chinese owner, ByteDance, refused to sell its stake in TikTok to an American company.

China will firmly oppose a forced sale of TikTok, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) said on Thursday, adding that the sale or divestiture of TikTok is subject to Chinese laws.

Although TikTok's CEO Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean who speaks fluent English, repeatedly emphasized that TikTok hires over 7,000 employees in the U.S. and it does not operate in the Chinese mainland at all, many U.S. congressmen seem to have only one thought: ban TikTok.

In Thursday's hearing, U.S. lawmakers pressed Chew over data security and harmful content, responding skeptically during a tense committee hearing to his assurances that the hugely popular video-sharing app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections.

Chew spent most of the hearing attempting to push back assertions that TikTok, or its Chinese parent company ByteDance, are tools of the Chinese government, arguing the platform was doing everything to ensure safety for its 150 million American users.

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Shelly Palmer, a professor of advanced media at Syracuse University who studies social network business models, said Chew did the best he could given the grilling he received from lawmakers who "in my opinion were not actually listening" but instead were grandstanding.

The U.S. congress, the White House, U.S. armed forces and more than half of U.S. states have already banned the use of the app from official devices. Similar bans have been imposed in other countries including Denmark, Canada, Great Britain and New Zealand, as well as the European Union. A complete TikTok ban in the U.S. would risk political and popular backlash from its young user base and civil liberties groups, said U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

David Kennedy, a former government intelligence officer who runs the cybersecurity company TrustedSec, said he agrees with restricting TikTok access on government-issued phones but that a nationwide ban might be too extreme.

"We have Tesla in China, we have Microsoft in China, we have Apple in China. Are they going to start banning us now?" Kennedy said. "It could escalate very quickly."

"If you think the U.S. needs a TikTok ban and not a comprehensive privacy law regulating data brokers, you don't care about privacy, you just hate that a Chinese company has built a dominant social media platform," Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wrote on Twitter.

Will TikTok access U.S. home wifi networks?  

U.S. Congressman Richard Hudson asked Chew if TikTok accesses U.S. home wifi networks.

"Only if the user turns on the wifi, I'm sorry, I may not understand that," Chew answered.

Hudson asked, "If I have TikTok on my phone and my phone is on my home wifi network, does TikTok access that network?"

"It will have to, to get the access to [the] network, it gets connections to the internet, if that's the question," Chew said in response.

"Is it possible it can access other devices on that home wifi network?" Hudson further asked. 

"We do not do anything that is beyond any industry norms. I believe the answer to your question is No," said Chew.

A national security risk?

In a bipartisan effort to rein in the power of a major social media platform, U.S. Republican and Democratic lawmakers hurled questions on topics including TikTok's content moderation practices, how the company plans to secure American data from China, and its spying on journalists.

"Mr. Chew, you are here because the American people need the truth about the threat TikTok poses to our national and personal security," Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, said in her opening statement.

Chew told the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that TikTok prioritizes the safety of its young users and denied it's a national security risk.

TikTok says 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by global institutional investors such as the Carlyle Group. "Ownership is not at the core of addressing these concerns," said Chew.

But for many others, it is. The Biden administration has reportedly demanded TikTok's Chinese owners sell their stakes in the company to avoid a nationwide ban. China has said it would oppose those attempts.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said at a separate committee hearing Thursday that he believes TikTok is a security threat, and "should be ended one way or another."

Chew said that TikTok has been "building what amounts to a firewall to seal off protected U.S. user data from unauthorized foreign access for more than two years.

The bottom line is this: "American data stored on American soil, by an American company, overseen by American personnel."

TikTok's data security project

At Thursday's House hearing, U.S. Congressman Neal Dunn asked Chew if ByteDance has spied on Americans at request of the Chinese government. Chew said "No."

Dunn then asked about U.S. media reports that a China-based team at ByteDance planned to use TikTok to monitor the location of specific U.S. citizens, and repeated his question about whether ByteDance was spying.

"I don't think that spying is the right way to describe it," Chew said. He went on to describe the reports as involving an "internal investigation," but was cut off by Dunn, who called TikTok's widespread use "a cancer."

Rejecting allegations of spying, Chew said TikTok had spent more than $1.5 billion on data security efforts with nearly 1,500 full-time employees. 

In recent discussions with ad buyers, TikTok representatives have stuck to the company's current talking points. TikTok employees have played up ongoing plans to separate the user data of Americans and store it in the country. The data will be housed in a new division called U.S. Data Security (USDS), which will be monitored by U.S. tech company Oracle, an effort dubbed "Project Texas."

At least one major ad firm held a call this week with TikTok sales representatives in an attempt to learn more detail about its data security practices.

Attempt to glorify self-harm and suicide?

"It is our commitment to this committee and all our users that we will keep (TikTok) free from any manipulation by any government," said Chew, adding that the app strictly screens content that could harm children.

In one of the most dramatic moments of the hearing, U.S. Republican Representative Kat Cammack played a TikTok video showing a shooting gun with a caption that included the House committee, with the exact date before it was formally announced.

"You expect us to believe that you are capable of maintaining the data security, privacy and security of 150 million Americans where you can't even protect the people in this room," Cammack said.

TikTok said the company on Thursday removed the video and banned the account that posted it.

U.S. Congressman Gus Bilirakis also showed the committee a collection of short TikTok videos that appeared to glorify self-harm and suicide, or outright tell viewers to kill themselves.

"Your technology is literally leading to death," Bilirakis said. "We must save our children from big tech companies like yours, who continue to abuse and manipulate them for your own gain."

Chew told Bilirakis that TikTok takes the issue of suicide and self-harm "very, very seriously."

(With input from agencies)

(Cover: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies during a hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 23, 2023. /CFP)