As Prepared for Delivery:

Chair Durbin, Ranking Member Graham, and Members of the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today.

My name is Shou Chew and I am the CEO of TikTok, an online community of more than a billion people worldwide -- including well over 170 million Americans -- who use our app every month to create, to share, and to discover. Although the average age on TikTok in the US is over 30, we recognize that special safeguards are required to protect minors, and especially when it comes to combatting all forms of CSAM.

As a father of three young children myself, I know the issues we’re discussing today are horrific -- and every parent's nightmare -- and I'm proud of our efforts to address the threats to young people online - from our commitment to protecting them, to our industry leading policies, use of innovative technology and significant, ongoing investments in trust and safety to achieve this goal.

TikTok is vigilant about enforcing its 13 and up age policy, and offers an experience for teens that is much more restrictive than you or I would have as adults.

We make careful product design choices to help make our app inhospitable to those seeking to harm teens. Let me give you a few examples of longstanding policies that are unique to TikTok:

  • First, direct messaging is not available to anyone under 16.
  • Second, accounts for people under 16 are automatically set to private along with their content. Furthermore, their content cannot be downloaded. And will not be recommended to people they do not know.
  • Third, every teen under 18 has a screentime limit automatically set to 60 minutes.
  • And Fourth, only people over 18 are allowed to host a livestream.

I'm proud to say that TikTok was among the first to empower parents to supervise their teens on our app with our Family Pairing tools - which include setting screen time limits and filtering out content from their teen's feed, amongst others.

We made these choices after consulting with doctors and safety experts who understand the unique stages of teenage development, to ensure that we have the appropriate safeguards to prevent harm and minimize risk.

Safety is one of the core priorities that defines TikTok under my leadership.

We currently have more than 40,000 trust and safety professionals working to protect our community, and we expect to invest more than two billion dollars in trust and safety efforts this year alone -- with a significant part of that investment in our US operations.

Our robust Community Guidelines strictly prohibit content or behavior that puts teenagers at risk of exploitation or other harm -- and we vigorously enforce them.

Our technology moderates all content uploaded to our app to help quickly identify potential CSAM and other material that breaks our rules -- it automatically removes the content or elevates it to our safety professionals for further review.

We also moderate direct messages for CSAM and related material, and use third-party tools like PhotoDNA and Take It Down to combat CSAM and prevent content from being uploaded to our platform.

We continually meet with parents, teachers and teens -- in fact, I sat down with a group just a few days ago. We use their insight to strengthen the protections on our platform, and we also work with leading groups like the Tech Coalition.

The steps we're taking to protect teens are a critical part of our larger trust and safety work, as we continue our voluntary and unprecedented efforts to build a safe and secure data environment for US users – ensuring our platform remains free from outside manipulation and implementing safeguards on our content recommendation and moderation tools.

Keeping teens safe online requires a collaborative effort as well as collective action. We share this committee’s concern and commitment to protect young people online, and we welcome the opportunity to work with you on legislation to achieve this goal.

Our commitment is ongoing and unwavering, because there is no finish line when it comes to protecting teens.

Thank you for your time and consideration today. I am happy to answer your questions.

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