TikTok Steers Its Charm Offensive Around Critics

The company is trying to win support in Washington but acknowledges it has a "trust deficit"

- By Alex Barinka, Emily Birnbaum & Zheping Huang

There may be no more American form of unwinding than attending a football game. So when TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shouzi Chew and his government policy team had some downtime in Washington on Sept. 21, they headed about a mile and a half south of the US Capitol to catch the annual Congressional Football Game. On the field, a team of lawmakers engaged in the tradition of getting pushed around by a team of Capitol Police officers, which is more or less the opposite dynamic of the meetings that Chew and his team have been taking lately.

TikTok, the massively popular video app owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd., is facing broad hostility in Washington. The White House; the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (Cfius), an interagency panel reviewing foreign investments with national security implications; and Congress are all considering actions that could significantly alter the way TikTok operates in its biggest market. In addition to general concerns about all social media companies, US officials worry about its data collection policies and its relationship to the Chinese government.

Chew knows he's playing from behind. He's warned his staff about a lack of trust toward TikTok in the US, according to people within the company who asked not to be named discussing private business. To drum up goodwill and defend TikTok's data protection and content moderation policies, Chew, as well as the company's chief operating officer, its head of US trust and safety, and a star-studded group of lobbyists, have engaged with 130 congressional offices since June, according to TikTok. This has included meetings, phone calls, emails, and conversations at events.