TikTok CEO Shou Chew and FII Institute CEO Richard Attias at #FII8

This original spark for TikTok, so what was exactly this original spark? Show, yeah, it's um... Richard, I think it's um we have to start from the mission of the business and it's important because ultimately you know we have thousands of employees and every day they're building towards something. The mission that we have is 'Inspire creativity and bring joy.' So that's sort of you know and I'll come back to this in a second because if you use TikTok, it sounds like you do every night for 30 minutes, you know you could spend more time if you want. The what you will find is a very creative experience, it's a very joyful experience. In terms of the original spark, you know the idea was to present content to users not based on who you followed because back in 2012, 2013, the social network was all the rage and it's all about building your social graph, meaning getting people to follow you, building out that graph, and the content that you will see is going to be based on people that you follow. And I think that's the model that many of our peers in the market still follow today. But we have brought something very new to the table. You know, we recommend content to you not based on how many people follow you but based on interest signals. Meaning if you have a good message, if you have a funny video, if you are a small hippo in Thailand which has gone completely viral called Moo Deng, if you haven't seen it, it's just searching, yeah. If you have a good message, you don't need any followers to begin with to become viral, to make sure that your message is heard by as many people around the world as possible. And I think that's the difference, you know, that's the key difference that we bring to the table.

There are a couple of things that you know in the last 10 years. First of all, machine learning and AI enabled the recommendation algorithm to be as useful and as interesting as it is today. It's very accurate if you think about it. There's no human curation really that goes into the recommendation process. It is really about using machine learning and then matching your signal interest with potential signal interest that you could have. And that's really sort of the magic of the algorithm. Now beyond that, in the last 10 years, everybody has a smartphone now, and smartphones have cameras. So we decided that the app was not only going to be based on text, not only going to be based on pictures, but we opened up video and we made video the main format for the app itself. And that's another innovation that we brought to the table. And the third is of course this idea that everybody should have the chance to publish. So it shouldn't just be in the hands of a small group of people. We allow essentially anyone with a camera, anyone with creativity, to be able to create something very quickly using all the tools that we give them and be able to share their message with the world. So that's really the difference that we brought.

Yeah, I think a lot of people still have this understanding, especially people who don't use the app that much, they think that the app is for young people, is dancing, is singing. Well, that's all true, there's still a lot of dancing and singing, but it's more than that now because we have more than a billion users around the world today. In many countries – how many as of today do you know? We don't disclose specifics, but it's definitely significantly larger than a billion active users around the world. And if you think about the content that we have even in this country, I was looking at the feed whenever I travel. I look at the feed and it's my third time in the Kingdom in just this year. There is somebody called Abdullah Al Alawi, for example. Abdullah Al Alawi is a local creator. He talks, he shares a lot of content about local culture. For example, I learned about the – I'm going to say this wrong – the shabab? He talked about the history of the shabab, the fishing net, and the years of the wheat, and how that original practical use is married into the culture today in the local context. It's amazing. I mean, I did not know about this. I think there is a female footballer called Farah, she plays for Al Ittihad I believe, she's on the platform and she's encouraging young women to learn about the sport, to pick up the sport. So it's no longer just about entertainment, the light dancing and singing which is still important. It is about community, it is about education, it's about heritage, it's about culture, it's about the arts. And I think that's a significant positive change to the world.

We provide tools. Well, first of all, to inspire creativity is the mission itself. We talked about the mission at the start: inspire creativity, bring joy. So creativity and joy, and joy is important. We'll talk about joy. This is your DNA. The DNA is creativity and joy. Exactly, it's built in the mission statement of the company. So what we provide is, if you open the app, you click the plus sign at the bottom, you go to effects, you're going to see thousands and thousands of effects that we bring to the table to help spark people's creativity. It's a tool that enables them to express themselves better. In terms of the content pool itself, what we are seeing is that things like BookTok, BookTok is a very organic movement on the platform where people talk about books that they like. It has tens of billions of views around the world today. There is something very interesting that we launched in the US about a year ago called the STEM feed. So this is, if you go to settings, content preferences, turn on STEM feed, you will see a feed that is only science and math content. And we are going to launch this in the Kingdom as well in conjunction with the Science and Technology University here. So we believe that this should be a platform that's not only about creativity and fun, but you could learn something as well. And we're going to take all the STEM and math content that we can find and we're going to put it in a dedicated and specialized feed for users in this country.

We think that the legacy is going to be defined by the mission. The mission: creativity and joy. And it is important. We talked a lot about the creative components. We can translate this into economic activity. So today in just the Kingdom, we have 125,000 businesses that use our platform. And because we talked about this earlier as well, you do not need to be famous, you don't need to have followers. If you have a good message, you're going to get an audience on TikTok. And that's the difference that we bring. So businesses with good products and a good message can find it very easy to get access to a large audience on our platform, which is why they embrace it. So most of them don't pay us, by the way. They just post content on our platform, interesting content, they get the audience that they want. So on an economic point of front, I think we are contributing to the local economies that we are in as well. And in terms of joy, there's one other thing that people don't talk about but we are very proud of it. Which is, for a very long time people assume that the only way you get viral is to say something controversial, outrageous, angry, toxic, you name it, provocative, you name it. But if you look at just two angles, if you look at the top 10 videos of TikTok every single year, we publish them, we're going to publish them again very soon, they're all joyful. Every single one of them. Last year there was a cat that looked like a dog, there was a dog that sounded like a cat. This is really very joyful types of content. And the number one creator on our platform, his name is Khaby. Khaby is a comedian. He is famous for just being entertaining. He's very creative. The way he's entertaining, I'm not sure if you have seen his videos, he does his face. Yeah, I saw. Khaby was unknown before TikTok. So unlike many other platforms, he wasn't famous before. He wasn't a famous politician, he wasn't a famous soccer player, he wasn't a famous celebrity. He was a factory worker in Italy. He had talent and he became the number one creator with 160 million followers on our platform. I think the joyful and the creative and the discovery element of this will define the legacy of our company.

I don't think so. I have a lot of respect for what you call traditional media. I think there's a lot of value in editorial standards, in robust journalism. And I think this is an industry that we want to help. We want to help them reach a bigger audience as well. So our platform is open to many news media outlets and many publishers, and a lot of them embrace our platform and they have found much larger audiences than they could have in a more traditional sense, just print and digital. On TikTok, some of them have tens of millions of followers and they're able to bring their robust news to an even greater audience. And it's something we have been working closely with the industry to power. In the Kingdom, we are working with SRMG Academy, for example, to help onboard more journalists, especially tech journalists, to better understand how to use TikTok to get a bigger audience. So I see us living in a very symbiotic relationship rather than one of replacement.

I think we bring a voice to many people. I think we bring creativity, we bring joy. We also align that dangerous misinformation has no place on our platform. So the way we govern – governance was my question? How do you? We have control. We have a set of rules that we call our Community Guidelines, and these guidelines are available on our website. So if you go, it's there, it's about 30 pages long today. We change it and update every now and again with refreshed guidelines. In the guidelines, you will find things that we allow or disallow on the platform. There are various rules. There are things that we absolutely do not allow, like dangerous misinformation, like violence. We take it off the platform. And then there are other things that we do not allow for our younger users. So if you are below a certain age, our content is actually more restricted for you. We have a more restricted experience. We don't allow you to use a few other features on our platform, like no direct messages by default if you're below 16, no live streaming if you're below 18. We put some restrictions on how much time you can spend on the platform if you are below 18. And we give parents a lot of tools to control the experience of their teenagers on our app. Because I have three children myself, I understand that parents need tools to be able to, on the one hand, you want your children to be part of the digital world because that's the world that we live in. On the other, I think we all need more tools to be able to have conversations, to build a healthy relationship between our children and their digital devices and apps that they use. So I think we're very aligned on many of these things. But generally speaking, the fact that this platform exists and it gives the normal person a voice, the small business, the soccer player, someone like Abdullah Alawi a voice to share about their heritage, their culture, their history, and their perspective on the world, I think that's actually a net positive. We just have to make sure that our community guidelines are well enforced.

Yeah, my experience of talking to younger entrepreneurs is typically I learn more from them than I find that I can say, because the times are changing. And a lot of times, as companies get bigger, we spend too much of our time in internal building and the mechanisms. And sometimes meeting young entrepreneurs, they're so close to their product, it's so refreshing. If I maybe would say one thing, it would be to continue to do that: get firsthand information. Don't rely on your managers to write reports for you. Go speak to your users. Don't rely on reading reports on how AI works, just go download the app and try it. Just try it yourself. Don't lose that, because I think as businesses grow, we tend to lose that.

I think it's going to be around three or four things. The first is trust. I think our industry is undergoing a period where people have questions: how are you thinking about this, how are you thinking about that? In the countries that we operate in, we are very global platforms in the sense that our users are all around the world, but in every country that we operate, the experience is deeply local. So I think earning trust locally, earning trust generally as an industry, is going to be a big challenge for all of us. And trust earning is not about being able to market yourself very well, although that helps. Ultimately, it's going to be based on the things that you have done. Did you fundamentally address people's concerns? And AI, yeah, that will be the technology part, which will be my third part. I think embracing technology and making sure that – this is clearly moving at a very fast speed – so we need to stay on top of it and understand the impact it's going to have on our business. And that in itself is challenging. And then of course, it is making sure that we continue to hear what our users want. We built e-commerce, the e-commerce experience, because our users wanted it. They saw something they like, they say, 'Can I just click and transact? Why can't I do that?' So it was in response to what they told us that we built that. And it's important to continue to do that. That would be the second thing. And finally, it's just keeping the organization fresh, young talent, people coming in with bright ideas and good ideas, making sure that they can be heard and they don't get lost.

Thank you.