Kevin Mayer, CEO of TikTok, accused Facebook of trying to destroy the American business of the Chinese app by blurring it with “evil attacks.”
In his first public comments since joining Disney’s TikTok, Mayer issued an 800-word defense of the viral video app, which is under pressure from US regulators and may even be banned by the White House.
Without TikTok, he said, American advertisers “would have little choice again.” He described Instagram Reels, a new Facebook video service to be launched in the US in early August, as a “copycat product” and noted that a similar Facebook service called Lasso had “quickly failed.”
“At TikTok we welcome the competition,” he said. “But let’s focus our energies on fair and open competition at the service of our consumers, rather than malign attacks by our competitor – Facebook, masquerading as patriotism and designed to end our presence in the United States.”
The rapid growth of TikTok, which now has hundreds of millions of users in the US, has threatened Facebook platforms, including Instagram.
Mayer made his statement just hours before Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg faced congressional questions about whether his company has created a monopoly by crushing or removing rivals.
According to comments prepared before the antitrust hearing, Zuckerberg described Facebook as a “proudly American company,” arguing that the rapid rise of Chinese technology threatens Western “values” of freedom of expression and democracy.
The heavily redacted statement will set the tone for the leadership of Mr. Mayer, an American media executive who arrived in June to boost TikTok’s reputation among American lawmakers on Capitol Hill skeptical of its Chinese ownership.
However, just a few weeks after his tenure, tensions are mounting between TikTok and Facebook, after the latter ran a series of campaign announcements by United States President Donald Trump, suggesting that TikTok was “spying.” to its tens of millions of US users, it claims TikTok denies. Privately, both investors and company experts have speculated that Facebook is pushing TikTok behind closed doors.
Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration is considering banning TikTok by blacklisting its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, for fear of national security. A consortium of its American investors led by Sequoia Capital and General Atlantic is also in talks with the United States Treasury regarding the purchase of the application.
In his statement, Mr. Mayer noted that TikTok’s plans to spend $ 200 million on creators on their app would create 10,000 jobs in the United States.
He also highlighted plans, which have been delayed due to the coronavirus, to launch a “Transparency and Accountability Center” that will allow strangers to observe their moderation policies “in real time” and “examine the real code that drives our algorithms “
He added: “We believe that all companies should disclose their algorithms, moderation policies and data flows to regulators.”
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