Thursday, March 28, 2024

TikTok Taps Director Of Chinese Military-Linked Firm For CEO.

TikTok’s new CEO is a former executive at a Chinese military-linked tech firm blacklisted by the Trump administration.

Shouzi Chew previously held the title of Chief Financial Officer at ByteDance – TikTok’s parent company that pledges to “promote socialist core values” – before earning the recent promotion. Prior to working for ByteDance, he served as the Chief Financial Officer of Xiaomi, a smartphone giant blacklisted over its ties to the People’s Liberation Army.

The designation was in response to the company’s involvement in the Chinese Communist Party to topple U.S. technological supremacy and its CEO receiving the “Outstanding Builder of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” award in 2019 from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

“He had also until March been a board member of Kingsoft Cloud, based out of the Chinese capital, which had one of its software applications blacklisted as a “national security” threat in January and has also been implicated in potential surveillance of China’s crackdown on its Uyghur Muslim population,” The Washington Examiner also notes.

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