WASHINGTON - Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, testified in front of Congress on Thursday, as calls for a forced sale of its US business or a nationwide ban gain momentum.
The hearing quickly devolved into a bloodbath of "yes or no" questions from politicians on both sides of the aisle, several of whom appeared uninterested in hearing full responses from the executive, Insider's Dan Whateley and Aaron Mok wrote.
The idea behind the hearing was to give TikTok — an app that says it has 150 million monthly active users in the US, or almost half the country's population — a chance to assuage lawmakers' concerns about the social media app's data privacy policies and its ties to China via its parent company, Bytedance.
Instead, the testimony drew criticism from Wall Street.
Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush, wrote in a report on Thursday that the testimony was "a 'disaster' moment that will likely catalyze more calls by lawmakers and the White House to look to ban TikTok within the US if the company does not look to spin-off and force a sale from Chinese parent ByteDance."
"I don't think he made any new friends today and changed any minds," said Matthew Schettenhelm, Bloomberg Intelligence's senior litigation and government analyst.
But snippets from the testimony also went viral on TikTok, with people mocking the proceedings and saying that lawmakers don't know the app well enough to litigate it.
And soon, Chew had the internet eating out of his hand.