CEO of Tiktok, Bytedance
TikTok's CEO on its future -- and what makes its algorithm different | Shou Chew
What makes Tik Tok content so viral? CEO Shou Chew dives into the inner workings of its algorithm, and talks about the challenges facing the app: from content moderation to digital addiction -- and delves into the thorny stuff -- issues like data privacy and government manipulation. In a wide-ranging conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson, Shou tells stories about the TikTok creators he loves, and speaks personally about this commitment to creativity and community. After the talk, Sherrell delves a little deeper into the implications of TikTok’s presence is society.
The TED Audio Collec...
About Shou Chew
Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, has continued to address concerns about data security, child safety, and the platform's relationship with the Chinese government. In a March 2023 appearance before the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee, Chew stated that ByteDance is not owned or controlled by the Chinese government, describing it as a private company. He outlined "Project Texas," an initiative he said involves storing U.S. user data on Oracle servers in the United States, overseen by American personnel. Chew also testified that TikTok does not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government and would not honor a request to do so. During a January 2025 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on child online safety, Chew described TikTok's policies, including a 13-and-up age requirement, default private accounts for users under 16, and a 60-minute screen time limit for users under 18. He stated that the company had invested more than $2 billion in trust and safety efforts that year and employed over 40,000 trust and safety professionals globally. In other public appearances, Chew has emphasized TikTok's economic impact and its use of AI. At the APEC CEO Summit in November 2024, he said the company had invested over $1.5 billion to secure U.S. user data and planned to spend 12 billion euros over the next decade on data protection in Europe. He also stated that TikTok supported nearly a quarter-million jobs in the U.S. and contributed almost $24 billion to the country's GDP. At the FII8 conference in October 2024, Chew discussed the platform's recommendation algorithm, describing it as based on machine learning and interest signals rather than follower counts. He also noted that 125,000 businesses in Saudi Arabia use the platform. Chew has stated that the company is investing billions of dollars in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, including a $12.2 million commitment to support small and medium-sized businesses.
Transcript (73 segments)
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Narrator0:03
Let's talk about scrambled eggs. Making the perfect batch of happy scrambled eggs can be a deceptively tricky task. It requires careful whisking to achieve full cohesion between the white and the yolk without over mixing. Then you'll need to cook them. The key is gently agitating the eggs with a spatula, making sure they cook evenly and completely but still leaving them soft and a little wet.
I learned how to cook the perfect batch of scrambled eggs from TikTok, from a creator known as The Kitchenista. And I'm not the only one. Forty thousand people have become followers of this home chef's feed full of recipes and cooking tutorials. And when it comes to TikTok, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition to teaching people like me the art of the scramble, this treasure trove of short videos has given rise to viral dance trends, created superstar influencers, and even disrupted the entire music industry. With over 830 million users, the Chinese-founded social media app has seen outstanding success around the world. And lately, it's also seen some controversy right here in the United States.
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Shirelle Dorsey1:18
I'm Shirelle Dorsey, and this is TED Tech. In 2020, President Trump moved to ban TikTok from the U.S., citing concerns around national security and data privacy. Just this year, Congress interrogated the app's CEO, Shou Chew, about these issues. And now the future of TikTok in the U.S. seems uncertain. So today, let's hear directly from Chew himself.
At this year's TED conference, Chew spoke with head of TED, Chris Anderson, about building his wildly successful social media app and how one single platform can connect the world to discover new thoughts, ideas, and perspectives.
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Chris Anderson2:08
It's very nice to have you here. Let's see, first of all, you know, congratulations. You really pulled off something remarkable on that grilling. You achieved something that very few people do, which was you pulled off a kind of a bipartisan consensus in U.S. politics. The bad news was that that consensus largely seemed to be we must ban TikTok. So we're going to come to that in a bit, and I'm curious about it. But before we go there, we need to know about you. You seem to me like a remarkable person. I want to know a bit of your story and how you came to TikTok in the first place.
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Shou Chew2:47
Okay, thank you, Chris. It's basically, if you're alive, you have had some kind of contact with TikTok at this point. So tell us about you. So my name is Shou, and I'm from Singapore. Roughly 10 years ago, two engineers were building a product, and the idea behind this was to build a product that recommended content to people not based on who they knew. Which was, if you think about it, 10 years ago, it was all the social graph was all the rage, and the idea was your content and the feed that you saw should be based on people that you knew. But 10 years ago, these two engineers thought about something different, which is instead of showing you people you knew, why do we show you content that you liked? And that's sort of the genesis and the birth of the early iterations of TikTok. And about five years ago, with the advent of 4G, short video, mobile phone penetration, TikTok was born. And a couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to run this company, and it still excites me every single day.
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Chris Anderson3:54
So I want to dig in a little more into this about what was it that made this takeoff so explosive. Because the language I hear from people who spend time on it, it's sort of like, I mean, it is a different level of addiction to other media out there. And I don't necessarily mean this in a good way, we'll be coming on to it. There's good and bad things about this type of addiction. But it's the feeling that within a couple of days of experience of TikTok, it knows you and it surprises you with things that you didn't know you were going to be interested in, but you are. How is it really, just instead of the social graph, what are these algorithms doing?
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Shou Chew4:34
I think to describe this, to begin to answer your question, we have to talk about the mission of the company. Now the mission is to inspire creativity and to bring joy. And I think missions for companies like ours is really important because you have product managers working on the product every single day and they need to have a North Star, something to sort of work towards together. Now based on this mission, our vision is to provide three things to our users. We want to provide a window to discover, and I'll talk about discovery in a second. We want to give them a canvas to create, which is going to be really exciting with new technologies in AI that's going to help people create new things. And the final thing is bridges for people to connect. So that's sort of the vision of what we're trying to build.
Now what really makes TikTok very unique and very different, it's the whole discovery engine behind us. So there are earlier apps that I have a lot of respect for, but they were built for a different purpose. For example, in the era of search, there was an app that was built for people who wanted to search things so that it's more easily found. And then in the era of social graphs, it was about connecting people and their followers. Now what we have done is that we are based on our machine learning algorithms, we're showing people what they like. And what this means is that we have given the everyday person a platform to be discovered. If you have talent, it is very, very easy to get discovered on TikTok. And I'll just give you one example of this. The biggest creator on TikTok is a guy called Khaby Lame. He was from Senegal, he lives in Italy, he was a factory worker. He, for the longest time, didn't even speak in any of his videos. But what he did was he had talent, he was funny, he had a good expression, he had creativity, so he kept posting. And today he has 160 million followers on our platform. So every single day we hear stories like that, businesses, people with talent. And I think it's very freeing to have a platform where as long as you have talent, you're going to be heard and you have the chance to succeed. And that's what we're providing to our users.
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Chris Anderson6:47
So this is the amazing thing to me. Like, we've most of us have grown up with say network television, where for decades you've had thousands of brilliant creative people toiling in the trenches trying to imagine stuff that will be amazing for an audience, and none of them ever remotely came up with anything that looked like many of your creators. So these algorithms, by just observing people's behavior and what they look like, have discovered things that thousands of brilliant humans never discovered. Tell me some of the things that it is looking at. So obvious things like if someone presses like or stays on a video for a long time, that gives you a clue, more like that. But is it subject matter? What are the array of things that you have noticed that you can actually track that provide useful clues?
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Shou Chew7:38
I'm going to simplify this a lot, but the machine learning, the recommendation algorithm is really just math. So for example, if you liked videos one, two, three, and four, and I liked videos one, two, three, and five, maybe he liked videos one, two, three, and six. Now what's going to happen is because we like one, two, three at the same time, he's going to be shown four, five, six, and so are we. And you can think about this repeated at scale in real time across more than a billion people. That's basically what it is, it's math. And of course, AI and machine learning has allowed this to be done at a very, very big scale. And what we have seen the result of this is that they learn the interest signals that people exhibit very quickly and shows you content that's really relevant for you in a very quick way.
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Chris Anderson8:25
Now so it's a form of collaborative filtering from what you're saying, that the theory behind it is that these humans are weird people, we don't really know what they're interested in, but if we see that one human is interested with an overlap of someone else, chances are you can make use of the other pieces that are in that overlapped human's repertoire to feed to them, and they'll be surprised, but the reason they like it is because their pal also liked it.
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Shou Chew8:54
It is pattern recognition based on your interest signals. And I think the other thing here is that we don't actually ask you 20 questions on whether you like a piece of content, what are your interests. We don't do that. We built that experience organically into the app experience. So you are voting with your thumbs. By watching a video, by swiping it, by liking it, by sharing it, you are basically exhibiting interest signals. And what it does mathematically is to take those signals, put it in a formula, and then matches it through pattern recognition. That's basically the idea behind it.
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Chris Anderson9:27
I mean, lots of startups have tried to use these types of techniques. I'm wondering what else played a role early on. I mean, how big a deal was it that from the get-go you were optimizing for smartphones, so that videos were shot in portrait format and they were short? Was that an early distinguishing thing that mattered?
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Shou Chew9:47
I think we were the first to really try this at scale. The recommendation algorithm is a very important reason as to why the platform is so popular among so many people. But beyond that, you mentioned the format itself. So we talked about the vision of the company, which is to have a window to discover. And if you sort of just open it up for the first time, you'll see that it takes up your whole screen. So that's the window that we want. You can imagine a lot of people using that window to discover new things in their lives. Then through this recommendation algorithm, we have found that it connects people together. People find communities. And I've heard so many stories of people who have found their communities because of the content that they're posting. And again and again I hear these stories. By connecting people together, by giving people the window to discover, we have given many small businesses and many people, your common person, a voice that they will never otherwise have. And I think that's the power of the platform.
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Chris Anderson10:49
So you definitely have identified early just how we're social creatures, we need affirmation. I've heard a story, and you can tell me whether true or not, that one of the keys to your early liftoff was that you wanted to persuade creators who were trying out TikTok that this was a platform where they would get response. Early on when you're trying to grow something, the numbers aren't there for response. So you had the brilliant idea of boosting those numbers a bit, basically finding ways to give people a bigger sense of like, more likes, more engagement than was actually the case, by using AI agents somehow in the process. Is that a brilliant idea or is that just a myth?
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Shou Chew11:30
I would describe it in a different way. So there are other platforms that exist before TikTok. And if you think about those platforms, you sort of have to be famous already in order to get followers, because the way it's built is that people come and follow people. And if you aren't already famous, the chances that you get discovered are very, very low. Now what we have done, again, because of the difference in the way we're recommending content, is that we've given anyone, any single person with enough talent, a stage to be able to be discovered. And I think that actually is the single, probably the most important thing contributing to the growth of the platform. And again and again you'll hear stories from people who use the platform, who post regularly on it, that if they have something they want to say, the platform gives them the chance and the stage to connect with their audience in a way that I think no other product in the past has ever offered them.
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Chris Anderson12:27
So I'm just trying to play back what you said. You said you were describing a different way. What I said is, is it then the case that to give someone a decent chance, someone who's brilliant but doesn't come with any followers initially, that you've got some technique to identify talent and that you will almost encourage them, you will give them some kind of artificially increase the number of followers or likes or whatever that they have, so that others are encouraged to go, wow, there's something there, and so forth. Like it's this idea of critical mass that kind of every entrepreneur, every party planner kind of knows about, of no, this is the hot place in town, everyone come, and that is how you actually gain critical mass.
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Shou Chew13:05
We want to make sure that every person who posts a video is given an equal chance to be able to have some audience to begin with. But this idea that you are maybe alluding to, that we can get people to like something, it doesn't really work like that.
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Chris Anderson13:23
But then could you get AI agents to like something? Could you seed the network with extra AI agents that could kind of give someone early encouragement?
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Shou Chew13:31
Ultimately what the machine does is it recognizes people's interests. So if you post something that's not interesting to a lot of people, even if you gave it a lot of exposure, you're not going to get the virality that you want. So there is no push here. It's not like you can go and push something because I like Chris, I'm going to push your content. It doesn't work like that. You got to have a message that resonates with people, and if it does, then it will automatically just have the virality itself. That's the beauty of user-generated content. It's not something that can be engineered or overthought. It really is something that has to resonate with the audience, and if it does, then it goes viral.
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Chris Anderson14:14
I was speaking privately with an investor who knows your company quite well, who said that actually the level of sophistication of the algorithms you have going is just another order of magnitude to what competitors like Facebook or YouTube have going. Is that just hype or do you really believe you, like how complex are these algorithms?
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Shou Chew14:38
Well, I think in terms of complexity, there are many companies with a lot of resources and a lot of talent. They will figure out even the most complex algorithms. I think what is very different is your mission of your company, how you started the company. Like I said, we started with this idea that this was the main use case, the most important use case is you come and you get to see recommended content. Now for some other apps out there, they are very significant and have a lot of users, they're built for a different original purpose. And if you're built for something different, then your users are used to that because the community comes in and they expect that sort of experience. So I think the pivot away from that, it's not really just a matter of engineering and algorithms, it's a matter of what your company is built to begin with, which is why I started this by saying you need to have a vision, you need to have a mission, and that's the North Star where you can't just shift it halfway.
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Chris Anderson15:34
And is it fair to say that because your start point has been interest algorithms rather than social graph algorithms, you've been able to avoid some of the worst of the sort of the filter bubbles that have happened in other social media, where you have tribes kind of declaring war on each other effectively, and so much of the noise and energy is around that. Do you believe that you've largely avoided that on TikTok?
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Shou Chew15:57
The diversity of content that our users see is very key. The vision is to discover, so in order to facilitate that, it is very important to us that what the users see is the diversity of content. Now generally speaking, there are certain issues that you mentioned that the industry faces. There's some bad actors who come on the internet, they post bad content. Our approach is that we have very clear community guidelines. We're very transparent about what is allowed and what is not allowed on our platform. No executives make any ad hoc decisions. And based on that, we have built a team that is tens of thousands of people plus machines in order to identify content that is bad and actively and proactively remove it from the platform.
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Chris Anderson16:47
Talk about what some of those key guidelines are.
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Shou Chew16:49
We have it published on our website. We just in March, we iterated a new version to make it more readable. So there are many things, like for example, no pornography, clearly no child sexual abuse material and other bad things, no violence. For example, we also make it clear that it's a differentiated experience if you're below 18 years old. So if you're below 18, for example, your entire app experience is actually more restricted. We don't allow, as an example, users below 16 by default to go viral. We don't allow that if you're below 16. We don't allow you to use the instant messaging feature in app. If you're below 18, we don't allow you to use the live streaming features. And of course we give parents a whole set of tools to control their teenagers' experience as well.
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Chris Anderson17:39
But how do you know the age of your users?
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Shou Chew17:42
In our industry, we rely mainly on something called age gating, which is when you sign up for the app for the first time and we ask you for the age. Now beyond that, we also have built tools to go through your public profile. For example, when you post a video, we try and match what the age that you said with the video that you just posted. Now there are questions of can we do more, and that question has, for every company by the way in our industry, to be balanced with privacy. Now if, for example, we scan the faces of every single user, then we will significantly increase the ability to tell their age, but we will also significantly increase the amount of data that we collect on you. Now we don't want to collect data, we don't want to scan data on your face to collect that. So that balance has to be maintained, and it's a challenge that we are working through together with industry, together with the regulators as well.
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Chris Anderson18:38
So look, one thing that is unquestionable is that you have created a platform for literally millions of people who never thought they were going to be a content creator. You've given them an audience. I'd actually like to hear from you one other favorite example of someone who TikTok has given an audience to that never had that before.
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Shou Chew18:54
I think, so when I travel around the world, I meet a whole bunch of creators on our platform. I was in South Korea just yesterday, and before that I met with a bunch of people. Don't expect, for example, teachers. There is an English teacher from Arkansas, her name is Claudine, and I met her in person. She uses her platform to reach out to students. There is another teacher called Chemical Kim, and Chemical Kim teaches chemistry. What she does is she uses our platform to reach out to a much broader student base than she has in a classroom, and they're both very, very popular. In fact, what we have realized is that STEM content has over 116 billion views on our platform globally, and it's so significant. In a year, cumulative 160 billion, it's so significant that in the US we have started testing creating a feed just for STEM content. Just for STEM content. I've been using it for a while and I learned something new. You want to know what it is? Apparently if you flip an egg on your tray, the egg will last longer. It's science. There's a whole video on this. I learned this on TikTok. You can search for this. You want to know something else about an egg? If you put it in just one hand and squeeze it as hard as you can, it will never break.
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Chris Anderson20:21
Yes, I think I read about that too. I'm not sure we can find it. We can search for it. Yes. But look, here's the flip side to all this amazingness. And it's really, honestly, this is the key thing that I want to have an honest conversation with you because it's such an important issue. This question of human addiction. You know, we are animals with a prefrontal cortex, that's how I think of us. We have these addictive instincts that go back millions of years, and we often are in the mode of trying to modulate our own behavior. It turns out that the internet is incredibly good at activating our animal cells and getting them so damn excited. And your company, the company you've built, is better at it than any other company on the planet, I think. So what are the risks of this? I mean, from a company point of view, for example, it's in your interest to have people on there as long as possible. So someone say, as a first pass, you want people to be addicted as long as possible. That's how advertising money will flow and so forth, and that's how your creators will be delighted. What is too much?
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Shou Chew21:43
I don't actually agree with that. As a company, our goal is not to optimize and maximize time spent. It is not. In fact, in order to address people spending too much time on our platform, we have done a number of things. I was just speaking with some of your colleagues backstage, one of them, Tony, she has encountered this as well. If you spend too much time on a platform, we will proactively send you videos to tell you to get off the platform. We will, and depending on the time of the day, if it's late at night, it will come sooner. We have also built-in tools to limit. If you're below 18 years old, by default we set a 60-minute default time limit.
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Chris Anderson22:24
How many? 60 minutes?
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Shou Chew22:25
60 minutes. And we've given parents tools and yourself tools. If you go to settings, you can set your own time limit. We've given parents tools so that you can pair, for the parents who don't know this, go to settings, family pairing, you can pair your phone with your teenager's phone and set the time limit. And we really encourage parents to have these conversations with their teenagers about what is the right amount of screen time. I think that's a healthy relationship that you should have with your screen. And as a business, we believe that that balance needs to be met. So it's not true that we just want to maximize time.
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Chris Anderson22:59
If you were advising parents here, what time they should actually recommend to their teenagers, what do you think is the right setting?
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Shou Chew23:05
Well, 60 minutes. We did not come up with it ourselves. So I went to the Digital Wellness Lab at the Boston Children's Hospital, and we had this conversation with them, and 60 minutes was the recommendation that they gave to us, which is why we built this into the app. Now, so 60 minutes, take it for what it is. It's something that we've had some discussions of experts. But I think for all parents here, it is very important to have these conversations with your teenage children and help them develop a healthy relationship with screens. I think we live in an age where it's completely inevitable that we're going to interact with screens and digital content, but I think we should develop healthy habits early on in life, and that's something I would encourage.
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Chris Anderson23:46
Are you sure that, like, it feels to me like this is a great thing to have. But aren't there always going to be a temptation in any given quarter or whatever to just push it a bit at the boundary and just dial back a bit on that so that you can hit revenue goals, etc., etc. Is it, are you saying that this is used scrupulously?
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Shou Chew24:08
I think, even if you think about it from a commercial point of view, it is always best when your customers have a very healthy relationship with your product. It's always best when it's healthy. So if you think about very short-term retention, maybe, but I don't think that's not the way we think about it. If you think about it from a longer-term perspective, what you really want to have is a healthy relationship. You don't want people to develop very unhealthy habits and then at some point they're going to drop it. So I think everything in moderation.
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Chris Anderson24:42
There's a claim out there that in China there's a much more rigorous standards imposed on the amount of time that children especially can spend on TikTok. Is that true?
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Shou Chew24:54
That is unfortunately a very, it's a misconception. So that experience that is being mentioned for Douyin, which is a different app, is for an under-14-year-old experience. Now if you compare that in the United States, we have under-13 experience in the US. It's only available in the US, it's not available here in Canada. In Canada we just don't allow it. If you look at the under-13 experience in the US, it's much more restricted than the under-14 experience in China. It's so restrictive that every single piece of content is vetted by our third-party child safety expert. And we don't allow any under-13s in the US to publish. We don't allow them to post and we don't allow them to use a lot of features. So I think that report, I've seen that report too, it's not doing a fair comparison.
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Chris Anderson25:42
What do you think of this issue? You know, in a lot of your, you've got these millions of content creators and all of them in a sense are in a race for attention. And that race can pull them in certain directions. So for example, teenage girls on TikTok, sometimes people worry that to win attention, they've discovered that by being more sexual that they can gain extra viewers. Is this a concern? Is there anything you can do about this?
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Shou Chew26:09
We address this in our community guidelines as well. If you look at sort of the sexualized content on our guidelines, if you're below a certain age, for certain themes that are mature, we actually remove that from your experience. Again, I come back to this. We want to have a safe platform. In fact, at my Congressional hearing, I made four commitments to our users and to the politicians in the US. And one of the first one is that we take safety, especially for teenagers, extremely seriously. And we will continue to prioritize that. I believe that we need to give our teenage users and our users in general a very safe experience, because if we don't do that, then we cannot, the mission is to inspire creativity and to bring joy, right? If they don't feel safe, I cannot fulfill my mission. So it's all very organic to me as a business to make sure I do that.
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Chris Anderson27:02
But in the strange interacting world of human psychology and so forth, weird memes can take off. I mean, you had this outbreak a couple years back with these so-called devious licks, where kids were competing with each other to do vandalism in schools and get lots of followers from it. How on Earth do you battle something like that?
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Shou Chew27:21
So dangerous challenges are not allowed on our platform. If you look at our guidelines, it's violative. We proactively invest resources to identify them and remove them from our platform. In fact, if you search for dangerous challenges on our platform today, we will redirect you to a safety resource page. And we actually worked with some creators as well to come up with campaigns. And this is another campaign, it's the Stop, Think, Decide Before You Act campaign, where we work with the creators to produce videos to explain to people that some of these things are dangerous, please don't do it. And we post those videos actively on our platform as well.
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Chris Anderson27:56
That's cool. And you've got lots of employees. I mean, how many employees do you have who are specifically looking at these content moderation things? Or is that the wrong question? Are they mostly identified by AI initially and then you have a group who are overseeing and making the final decision?
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Shou Chew28:14
The group is based in Ireland, and it's a lot of people. It's tens of thousands of people.
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Chris Anderson28:20
Tens of thousands?
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Shou Chew28:21
It's a huge, it's one of the most important cost items of my P&L. And I think it's completely worth it. Now most of the moderation has to be done by machines. The machines are good, they're quite good, but they're not perfect at this point. So you have to complement them with a lot of human beings today. And I think by the way, a lot of the progress in AI in general is making that kind of content moderation capabilities a lot better. So we're going to get more precise, we're going to get more specific, and it's going to be able to handle larger scale. And that's something I think that I'm personally looking forward to.
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Chris Anderson29:00
What about this perceived huge downside of use of, certainly Instagram, I think TikTok as well, what people worry that you are amplifying insecurities, especially of teenagers and perhaps especially teenage girls. That they see these amazing people on there doing amazing things, they feel inadequate. There's all these reported cases of depression, insecurity, suicide, and so forth.
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Shou Chew29:27
I take this extremely seriously. So again, in our guidelines, for certain themes that we think are mature and not suitable for teenagers, we actually proactively remove it from their experience. At the same time, if you search certain terms, we will make sure that you get redirected to a resource safety page. Now we are always working with experts to understand some of these new trends that could emerge and proactively try to manage them. Now this is a problem that predates us, that predates TikTok, it actually predates the internet. But it's our responsibility to make sure that we invest enough to understand and to address the concerns to keep the experience as safe as possible for as many people as possible.
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Chris Anderson30:12
Now in Congress, the main concern seemed to be not so much what we've talked about, but data. The data of users, the fact that you're owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company, and the concern that at any moment, the Chinese government might require or ask for data. In fact, there have been instances where I think you've confirmed that some data of journalists on the platform was made available to ByteDance's engineers, and from there, who knows what. Now your response to this was to have this Project Texas, where you're moving data to be controlled by Oracle here in the US. Can you talk about that project and why, if you believe it so, why we should not worry so much about this issue?
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Shou Chew31:01
I will say a couple of things about this, if you don't mind. The first thing I would say is that the internet is built on global interoperability, and we are not the only company that relies on the global talent pool to make our products as good as they are. Technology is a very collaborative effort. I think many people here would say the same thing. So we are not the first company to have engineers in all countries, including in China. We're not the first one. Now I understand some of these concerns. So the data access by employees is not data accessed by government. This is very different, and there's a clear difference in this. But we hear the concerns, they are raised in the United States. We did not try to avoid discussing or we did not try to argue our way out of it. What we did was we built an unprecedented project where we localized American data to be stored on American soil by an American company overseen by American personnel. So this kind of protection for American data is beyond what any other company in our industry has ever done. It's very expensive to build something like that. And more importantly, we are basically localizing data in a way that no other company has done. So we need to be very careful that whilst we are pursuing what we call digital sovereignty in the US, and we're also doing a version of this in Europe, that we don't balkanize the internet. Now we are the first to do it, and I expect that other companies are probably looking at this and trying to figure out how you balance between protecting data to make sure that everybody feels secure about it, while at the same time allowing for interoperability to continue to happen, because that's what makes technology and the internet so great.
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Chris Anderson32:48
How far are you along that journey with Project Texas?
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Shou Chew32:51
We are very, very far along today.
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Chris Anderson32:54
When will there be a clear, here it is, it's done, it's firewall, this data is protected?
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Shou Chew33:01
Today, by default, all new US data is already stored in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure. So it's in this protected US environment that we talked about in the United States. We still have some legacy data to delete in our own servers in Virginia and in Singapore. Our data has never been stored in China, by the way. And that deletion is a very big engineering effort. So as I said at the hearing, it's going to take us a while to delete them, but I expect it to be done this year.
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Chris Anderson33:30
How much power do you have of your own ability to control certain things? So for example, suppose that for whatever reason, the Chinese government was to look at an upcoming US election and say, you know what, we would like this party to win, let's say, or we would like civil war to break out or whatever. And we could do this by amplifying the content of certain troublemaking, disturbing people, causing uncertainty, spreading disinformation, etc. Were you required via ByteDance to do this? Like, first of all, is there a pathway where theoretically that's possible? What's your personal line in the sand on this?
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Shou Chew34:18
So during the Congressional hearing, I made four commitments. We talked about the first one, which is safety. The third one is to keep TikTok a place of freedom of expression. By the way, if you go on TikTok today, you can search for anything you want as long as it doesn't violate our community guidelines. And to keep it free from any government manipulation. And the fourth one is transparency and third-party monitoring. So the way we are trying to address this concern is an unprecedented amount of transparency. What do I mean by this? We're actually allowing third-party reviewers to come in and review our source code. I don't know any other company that does this, by the way. Just so, because everything as you know is driven by code, so to allow someone else to review the source code is to give this a significant amount of transparency to ensure that the scenarios that you described, the hypothetical, cannot happen on our platform. Now at the same time, we are releasing more research tools for researchers so that they can study the output. So the source code is the input, we are also allowing researchers to study the output, which is the content on our platform. I think the easiest way to sort of defend ourselves is transparency. We give people access to monitor us and we can just make it very, very transparent. And that's our approach to the problem.
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Chris Anderson35:33
So you will say directly to this group that the scenario I talked about of theoretical Chinese government interference in an American election, you can say that will not happen?
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Shou Chew35:46
I can say that we are building all the tools to prevent any of these actions from happening. And I'm very confident that with an unprecedented amount of transparency that we're giving on the platform, we can reduce this risk to as close to zero as possible.
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Chris Anderson36:04
Too slow. A zero as possible?
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Shou Chew36:08
As close to zero as possible.
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Chris Anderson36:12
That's fairly reassuring. Fairly. I mean, how would the world know, and what would, like, if you discovered this or you thought you had to do it, is this a line in the sand for you? Like, are you at a situation you would not let the company that you know now and that you are running do this?
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Shou Chew36:32
Absolutely. That's the way we're letting third parties monitor them, because if they find, they will disclose this. We also have transparency reports, by the way, where we talk about a whole bunch of things. The content that we remove that violates our guidelines, government requests, it's all published online. All you have to do is search for it.
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Chris Anderson36:53
So you're super compelling and likable as a CEO, I have to say. And I would like to, as we wrap this up, I'd like to give you a chance just to paint, like, what's the vision? What, as you look at what TikTok could be, let's move the clock out, say five years from now, how should we think about your contribution to our collective future?
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Shou Chew37:12
I think it's still down to the vision that we have. So in terms of the window of discovery, I think there's a huge benefit to the world when people can discover new things. People think that TikTok is all about dancing and singing, and there's nothing wrong with that because it's super fun. There's still a lot of that, but we're seeing science content, STEM content. Have you heard about BookTok? It's a viral trend that talks about books and encourages people to read. BookTok has 120 billion views globally. 120 billion, with a B. People are learning how to cook, people are learning about science, people are learning how to golf. Well, if you are watching videos on golfing, I guess I haven't gotten better by looking at the videos. I think there's a huge, huge opportunity here on discovery and giving the everyday person a voice. If you talk to our creators, a lot of people will tell you this again and again, that before TikTok they would never have been discovered, and we have given them the platform to do that. And it's important to maintain that. Then we talk about creation. There's all this new technology coming in with AI, generative content, that will help people create even more creative content. I think there's going to be a collaboration between people and AI where they can unleash their creativity in a different way. Like for example, I'm terrible at drawing personally, but if I had somebody AI to help me, then maybe I can express myself even better. Then we talk about bridges to connect, and connecting people in the communities together. This could be products, this could be commerce. Five million businesses in the US benefit from TikTok today. I think we can get that number to a much higher number. And of course if you look around the world, including in Canada, that number is going to be massive. So I think these are the biggest opportunities that we have, and it's really very exciting.
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Chris Anderson39:08
So you're one of the most influential and powerful people in the world, whether you know it or not. And I really appreciate you coming and sharing your vision. I really, really hope the upside of what you're talking about comes about. Thank you so much.
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Shou Chew39:19
Thank you for coming. Thank you.
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Chris Anderson39:21
Thank you so much. Thank you. Really, it's really interesting.
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Shirelle Dorsey39:31
TikTok is a fascinating space, one for learning and entertainment, for finding and supporting small businesses, and even increasingly for finding news and information. It's also pretty addictive. Candidly, I've been guilty of taking a quick peek to catch up on my favorite creators' videos, only to look up an hour later, not realizing how much time has passed. Beyond getting lost in the rabbit hole of content, the negative impacts of social media on our mental health and our social connections continues to spiral. While Chew outlined some of the features that TikTok has implemented to protect children, like preventing anyone under the age of 13 from going viral or disabling anyone under 18 from going live on the platform, the company still seems to be struggling to meet the challenges of privacy, bullying, and data collection. So look, it's complex, and I'm not going to pretend to tie it all up in a nice little bow. But I will say that social media is neither good nor bad. We have to accept that these platforms are cementing their permanence as the virtual third space across a global society. We're all going to be connected whether we like it or not. So it's on us to find ways to do so safely and harmoniously.
TED Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Isabelle Carter, who also wrote it with me, Shirelle Dorsey. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar, and the show is fact-checked by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Farrah De Grunge and Nina Lawrence for production support. If you're enjoying the show, make sure to subscribe and leave us a review so other people can find us too. I'm Shirelle Dorsey. Let's keep digging into the future. Join me next week for more.