The latest viral trend on TikTok is defending TikTok.
“Now is the time to fight the TikTok ban,” a TikTok caption read. video which was published on Thursday about the future of the app. “#savetiktok #keeptiktok”
“Do I think TikTok should be banned? No,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., said Friday on her first TikTok. videowhich garnered more than 3.7 million views.
Other TikTok users shared video montages of the app’s CEO, shou chewto pop songs and applied the “fancam” treatment typically reserved for celebrities.
On TikTok, users have jumped in recent days in defense of the popular video application, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. In hundreds of videos, they argued that the app should not be banned in the United States over national security concerns, questioned why American social media apps don’t face similar scrutiny, and expressed concern that their First Amendment rights are being attacked.
The protest follows growing concerns from lawmakers and the Biden administration about whether TikTok provides sensitive data about American users to Chinese authorities. On Thursday Mr. Chew appeared before the Congress and was questioned for about five hours, with lawmakers questioning whether TikTok was spying on Americans on behalf of the Chinese government, endangering young people with toxic content and invading people’s privacy.
Mr. Chew said that TikTok had a plan to protect US user data and denied that the Chinese government controls ByteDance. But his responses were largely met with derision from lawmakers, fueling calls for TikTok to be banned entirely from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the United States. The Biden administration has also pushed for TikTok to be separated from ByteDance through a salea movement that China has opposedor to try to reach an agreement with the US government about data security concerns.
But on TikTok, lawmakers’ concerns landed with a thud.
“There has to be an age limit for congressional positions because this was so embarrassing,” one user wrote in the caption of a photo. video posted on friday.
Many were strongly against the TikTok ban in the United States. doctors, self defense experts, parenting influencers and others shared videos saying that they were already doing research ways to access the app even if it was banned and blamed Facebook and Google for criticism.
The #TikTokBan hashtag had 1.7 billion views on Monday compared to 983 million views on March 18th.
Many TikTok users also endorsed Mr. Chew, who is from Singapore. They featured lawmakers asking yes or no questions of the executive and then interrupting it. They also portrayed Chew’s responses as victories against uninformed legislators, who sometimes raised basic questions about the Internet.
And they made their disgust known in their videos. Some users have put together old photos of Mr. Chew and clips from the audience with viral TikTok songs, like Chris Brown’s.Under the influence” and from Apink “Mister. Chu” (pronounced the same as Mr. Chew). One user posted videos of “Schitt’s Creek” character David Rose sighing and rolling his eyes to express his disdain for lawmakers’ questions. One account shared a video of a toddler responding to the clips with exasperation.
The answer was probably what TikTok expected. Mr. Chew, you have avoided the public eye for much of his tenure as CEO, he posted a video last week on TikTok’s main account and told US users that lawmakers “could take TikTok away from the 150 million of you.” She posted another video after the hearing, reiterating TikTok’s messages to lawmakers. Each video received more than 25 million views.
“It seems clear that much of the United States did not experience the hearing in the same way that many members of Congress and political pundits did,” Brooke Oberwetter, a spokesperson for TikTok, in a statement.
Mr. Chew’s posts were apparently taken seriously by some fans posting on TikTok that they found him attractive. One video spliced photos of Mr. Chew to the lyrics of K-pop girl group New Jeans: “Oh oh my God, I really hoped it would pull through.” The caption read, “Come get us, shou oppa,” referring to a Korean term for older men. It got more than 4.3 million views.
Others called Mr. Chew, 40, who is married with two children, “zaddy,” a slang term that rhymes with “dad” and refers to older, attractive men.
“If TikTok is bad, why is it good?” an user aware in a video with more than three million views. “Shou Zi Chew didn’t chew, he devoured,” said one comment, which had some 29,000 likes, below another supporting video. mr chew.
Chew, who had fewer than 20,000 followers on his personal TikTok account on March 21, now has 557,000 followers, according to Trendpop, a social media analytics firm.
TikTok users also mocked some of the lawmakers’ questions. One target of his wrath was Rep. Richard Hudson, Republican of North Carolina, who asked Mr. Chew at last week’s hearing on whether TikTok “can access your home Wi-Fi network.” The exchange, including Mr. Chew’s puzzled response stating “only if the user turns Wi-Fi on,” was shared across multiple posts.
One caption read: “We’re not… entirely sure… if Rep Richard Hudson knows how TikTok OR WiFi works.” Another caption featured a series of blushing, wide-eyed emojis.
