Chris Anderson: It's very nice
to have you here. Let's see. First of all, 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 US politics. It was great. (Laughter) 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, 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. Shou Chew: Thank you, Chris. Before we do that, can I just check,
need to know my audience, how many of you here use TikTok? Oh, thank you. For those who don’t, the Wi-Fi is free. (Laughter) CA: There’s another question, which is, how many of you here have had
your lives touched through TikTok, through your kids
and other people in your lives? SC: Oh, that's great to see. CA: It's basically, if you're alive, you have had some kind of contact
with TikTok at this point. So tell us about you. SC: So my name is Shou,
and I’m from Singapore. Roughly 10 years ago, I met with two engineers
who 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, the social graph was all in the rage. And the idea was, you know, 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 -- instead of showing you people you knew, why don't 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. CA: So I want to dig in
a little more into this, about what was it that made
this take-off so explosive? Because the language I hear
from people who spent 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? SC: 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 [are] really important. Because you have product managers
working on the product every single day, and they need to have
a North Star, you know, 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,
you talked about this, 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 are 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 is the whole discovery engine behind it. 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, you know, there was an app that was built
for people who wanted to search things so that is 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 ...
based on our machine-learning algorithms, we're showing people what they liked. 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. Khaby 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. CA: So this is the amazing thing to me. Like, 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, just by 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? SC: 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 like 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, you know, 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 it learns the interest signals that people exhibit very quickly and shows you content
that's really relevant for you in a very quick way. CA: So it's a form of collaborative
filtering, from what you're saying. 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 know, you could make use of the other pieces that are in that overlapped
human's repertoire to feed them, and they'll be surprised. But the reason they like it
is because their pal also liked it. SC: It's 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,
you know, 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. CA: I mean, lots of start-ups 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? SC: I think we were the first
to really try this at scale. You know, the recommendation algorithm
is a very important reason as to why the platform is so popular
among so many people. But beyond that, you know,
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 just open the app
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, you know, 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. Now, I'll give you an example. I was in DC recently, and I met
with a bunch of creators. CA: I heard. (Laughter) SC: One of them was sitting
next to me at a dinner, his name is Samuel. He runs a restaurant in Phoenix, Arizona,
and it's a taco restaurant. He told me he has never done
this before, first venture. He started posting
all this content on TikTok, and I saw his content, I was hungry after looking at it,
it's great content. And he's generated so much
interest in his business, that last year he made something like
a million dollars in revenue just via TikTok. One restaurant. And again and again, I hear these stories, you know, 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. CA: 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 goosing those numbers a bit, basically finding ways
to give people, you know, 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? SC: 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 have 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 will 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. CA: So I'm just trying to play back
what you said there. You said you were describing
a different way what I said. Is it then the case that like,
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, you know, 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." Like it's this idea of critical mass
that kind of, every entrepreneur, every party planner kind of knows about of "No, no, this is the hot place
in town, everyone come," and that that is how
you actually gain critical mass? SC: 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. CA: Could you get AI agents
to like something? Could you seed the network with extra AI
agents that could kind of, you know, give someone early encouragement? SC: 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 it's a lot of ... 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've 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 over-thought. It really is something that has
to resonate with the audience. And if it does, then it goes viral. CA: 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, you know,
Facebook or YouTube have going. Is that just hype
or do you really believe you -- like, how complex are these algorithms? SC: Well, I think in terms of complexity, there are many companies
who have 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, you know,
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 are built for a different
original purpose. And if you are 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 is 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. You can't just shift it halfway. CA: Right. 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? SC: The diversity of content
that our users see is very key. You know, in order for the discovery --
the mission is to discover -- sorry, the vision is to discover. So in order to facilitate that, it is very important to us that what the users see
is a diversity of content. Now, generally speaking, you know, there are certain issues
that you mentioned that the industry faces, you know. There are some bad actors
who come on the internet, they post bad content. Now 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. CA: Talk about what some
of those key guidelines are. SC: We have it published on our website. In March, we just 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 years old, 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 livestreaming features. And of course, we give parents
a whole set of tools to control their teenagers’
experience as well. CA: How do you know the age of your users? SC: 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 to match the age that you said
with the video that you just posted. Now, there are questions
of can we do more? And the question always has,
for every company, by the way, in our industry, has 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. CA: 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. SC: So when again, when I travel around the world, I meet with a whole bunch
of creators on our platform. I was in South Korea just yesterday,
and before that I met with -- yes, 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 our 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 her classroom. And they're both very, very popular. You know, in fact, what we have realized is that STEM content has over 116 billion views
on our platform globally. And it's so significant -- CA: In a year? SC: Cumulatively. CA: [116] billion. SC: 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. CA: 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. SC: Yes, I think I read about that, too. CA: It's not true. (Laughter) SC: We can search for it. CA: But look, here's here's the flip side
to all this amazingness. And honestly, this is the key thing, that I want to have an honest,
heart-to-heart 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, how ... From a company point of view, for example, it's in your interest to have people
on there as long as possible. So some would 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? SC: I don't actually agree with that. You know, 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 told me
she has encountered this as well. If you spend too much time
on our 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 below 18 years old, by default, we set a 60-minute default time limit. CA: How many? SC: Sixty 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 on what is the right amount
of screen time. I think there’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 spent. CA: If you were advising parents here what time they should actually
recommend to their teenagers, what do you think is the right setting? SC: 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. 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. CA: Curious to ask the audience, which of you who have ever had
that video on TikTok appear saying, “Come off.” OK, I mean ... So maybe a third of the audience
seem to be active TikTok users, and about 20 people maybe
put their hands up there. Are you sure that -- like, it feels to me
like this is a great thing to have, but are you ... isn'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? Are you saying that this
is used scrupulously? SC: I think, you know, in terms ... 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 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 know. 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. CA: 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 the TikTok equivalent of that. SC: That is unfortunately 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 an 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 that report,
I've seen that report too, it's not doing a fair comparison. CA: What do you make of this issue? You know, 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? SC: We address this in our community
guidelines as well. You know, if you look at sort of
the sexualized content on our guidelines, if you’re below a certain age, you know, for certain themes
that are mature, we actually remove that
from your experience. Again, I come back to this, you know, 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 the first one is that we take safety,
especially for teenagers, extremely seriously, and we will continue to prioritize that. You know, 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 fulfill -- the mission is to inspire
creativity and to bring joy. 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. CA: 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 devious licks where kids
were competing with each other to do vandalism in schools and, you know, get lots of followers from it. How on Earth do you battle
something like that? SC: 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. 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 things are dangerous, please don't do it. And we post these videos
actively on our platform as well. CA: 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? SC: The group is based in Ireland
and it's a lot of people, it's tens of thousands of people. CA: Tens of thousands? SC: It's one of the most important
cost items on my PnL, 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 as good as, you know, 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. You know, 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. CA: 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 of teenage girls. 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. SC: I take this extremely seriously. So 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,
if that makes sense. 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. CA: 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, Chinese company, and the concern that at any moment Chinese government might require
or ask for data. And 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? SC: 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 possible. 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. You know, 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
that are raised in the United States. We did not try to avoid discussing. We did not try to argue our way out of it. What we did was we built
an unprecedented project where we localize 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. Well, money is not the only issue here, but it's very expensive
to build something like that. And more importantly, you know, 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 are 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, you know, other companies are probably
looking at this and trying to figure out how you balance
between protecting, protected data, you know, 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. So that's something that we are doing. CA: How far are you along that journey
with Project Texas? SC: We are very, very far along today. CA: When will there be a clear you know, here it is, it’s done, it’s firewalled,
this data is protected? SC: 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. That deletion is a very big
engineering effort. So as we said, 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. CA: How much power do you have over 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. How ... "And we could do this by amplifying the content of certain
troublemaking, disturbing people, causing uncertainty,
spreading misinformation," etc. If you were required
via ByteDance to do this, like, first of all, is there a pathway
where theoretically that is possible? What's your personal
line in the sand on this? SC: 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. 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 that are highly 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
fend this off is transparency. You know, we give people
access to monitor us, and we just make it very,
very transparent. And that's our approach
to the problem. CA: 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? SC: 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 low as zero as possible. CA: To as low as zero as possible. SC: To as close to zero as possible. CA: As close to zero as possible. That's fairly reassuring. Fairly. (Laughter) I mean, how would the world know? If you discovered this
or you thought you had to do it, is this a line in the sand for you? Like, are you in a situation you would
not let the company that you know now and that you are running do this? SC: Absolutely. That's the reason why we're letting
third parties monitor, because if they find out,
you know, 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, you know,
that violates our guidelines, government requests. You know, it's all published online. All you have to do is search for it. CA: 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? 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? SC: 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. You know, 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 about BookTok? It's a viral trend that talks about books and encourages people to read. That BookTok has
120 billion views globally, 120 billion. CA: Billion, with a B. SC: People are learning how to cook, people are learning about science, people are learning how to golf -- well, people are watching
videos on golfing, I guess. (Laughter) 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, you know, 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. You know, there’s all this new technology
coming in with AI-generated content that will help people create
even more creative content. I think there's going to be
a collaboration between, and I think there's a speaker
who is going to talk about this, between people and AI where they can unleash
their creativity in a different way. You know, like for example,
I'm terrible at drawing personally, but if I had some AI to help me, then maybe I can express
myself even better. Then we talk about bridges to connect and connecting people
and 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. CA: So courtesy of your
experience in Congress, you actually became a bit
of a TikTok star yourself, I think. Some of your videos have gone viral. You've got your phone with you. Do you want to make a little
little TikTok video right now? Let's do this. SC: If you don't mind ... CA: What do you think,
should we do this? SC: We're just going to do
a selfie together, how's that? So why don't we just say "Hi." Hi! Audience: Hi! CA: Hello from TED. SC: All right, thank you,
I hope it goes viral. (Laughter) CA: If that one goes viral, I think
I've given up on your algorithm, actually. (Laughter) Shou Chew, 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 for coming today. SC: Thank you, Chris. CA: It's really interesting. (Applause)
TED has a big problem and is that they can't control what happens on their platform this has already caused already plenty of issues and this is I think is the biggest one so far
TED lost it years ago when it was clear they don't bother to fact check their speakers. Just look at Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes.
ЯED
He has the buzz word bingo bollocks throughout the interview.
TED? DID I SOME HOW TRAVEL BACK TO 2011?