TikTok has a credibility problem with Congress

On Monday we talked about some of the pressures stacking up on TikTok: increasing skepticism from Congress about its Chinese parent company ByteDance; a raft of new competitors slurping up venture capital and building their own short-form video apps powered by machine learning; and the public-perception risk that comes from keeping executives behind the scenes and responding to questions primarily via blog post.

Well, today there was a new blog post.

In it, Vanessa Pappas, TikTok’s general manager for the United States, laid out her case that the management team behind the app is and will remain independent of demands from the Chinese government. The company is building out a US-based leadership team, a US-based content moderation...

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