taken to try to solve those issues across the board, not just on tiktok. but on all the social media platforms and i absolutely would let my child used the app because i think it it s a great has a lot of value, right. you can use it to learn so much information about different topics. you can use it to find your people find their communities and learn about different things that you re really interested in. and so because of that value, i think it outweighs the potential cons that they re talking about. and hannah before we go. i mean, do you think that you ve built this community around? wage transparency. essentially would that have been possible? no oh, my gosh. no i would not have been able to build my platform starting on facebook, youtube or instagram. just the reach that videos get on tiktok was a huge game changer for me. the first day we posted our video. it went viral overnight. it got six million views within, like a week. unheard of. i ve still to this day. i have not seen
social media apps on the planet , and it is also one of the most controversial a billion monthly active users over 150 million right here in the united states. they shoot and they share videos on tiktok for fun or they watch them and others earn entire incomes through it. so many of the nations were watching today s high stakes hearing over on capitol hill lawmakers on both sides of the aisle absolutely pummeled tiktok ceo with questions, many of them, arguing the app should be completely banned in the united states over concerns that it is controlled by communist china, along with its parent company to spy on users or even influenced those who think that they re simply watching videos. by dance is not owned or controlled by the chinese government. there are more than 150 million americans who love our platform, and we know we have a responsibility to protect them to the american people watching today. here this tiktok is a
from jp. he s a student from alexandria, virginia. do they realize how easy it is for kids to access and appropriate content on tiktok? why is it designed that way? alex that s a question coming from a kid himself, so he knows what he s talking about. that s right. i mean, this is a problem with all of the social media companies that have large youth populations is trying to separate out the kids from the adult content, which in some cases is explicitly allowed or allowed up to a certain limit is a real problem. we see it on instagram. we see it on twitter. we see it on snapchat. um and so i part of the problem is that we don t create communities just for kids, um and there s been a debate of whether or not it would be better for these platforms to create special kid versions, which something that s been proposed. but has that become something that they do? the chinese version of the app as we just learned in a piece earlier in the show they have for under 14 year olds. they can
would be quite expensive for us. buyer abby. your guess is as good as mine. yeah. i mean, it is. there are billions of dollars tied up in that vanessa, your cave, which thank you very much. now the focus on today s hearing in washington was washington and tiktok 150. million people across the united states use that apps. so what could all of this mean for them here to discuss? that is cara swisher, host of the podcast pivot. and on with kara swisher and the u. s. editor in chief of tech radar. lance ulanoff. karen want to start with you. look this was a tense hearing today to say the least. i want you to take a listen to. i think one of the key moments from today s hearing. do any bite dance employees in china, including engineers currently have access to user us user data. today all us user data is stored by default in the oracle cloud
project texas, which we ve reviewed and been met with tiktok that discussed project texas doesn t really address the core issue, which is control of the algorithm and so long as bytedance, which is the parent company that owns ticktock, which is effectively controlled by the ccp controls the algorithm. they can use this app as a platform for spreading disinformation influencing what news americans see. influencing future elections. that s the concern, which is why we favor either a band or a forced sale. we have the only bipartisan bicameral bill that would do either of those two things. and so i have not been satisfied with what i heard from tiktok on this issue, and congressman krishnamoorthi on the politics of this briefly. i mean, look, there are 100 and 50 million american users of this app, many of them younger people. secretary of commerce gina raimondo said recently that if tiktok is banned, the politicians me thinks you re literally going to lose every