Shou Zi Chew
Singaporean businessman, CEO of TikTok
Shou Zi Chew (Chinese: 周受资) (born 1 January 1983) is a Singaporean businessman and entrepreneur who has served as chief executive officer (CEO) of TikTok since 2021.
Quotes
edit- On TikTok, we aim to provide three things. The first is a window to discover. This window, the For You feed, opens to a stream of videos curated to your interests, making it easy to find content and creators you love. The second is a canvas to create. Whether it’s demonstrating a new science experiment or the latest cooking trend, people around the world use TikTok to unleash creativity. The third is a bridge to connect. Through TikTok, people have discovered new communities, cultures, and interests.
- TikTok has empowered millions of Americans to express their voices in their own authentic way and has provided a global stage for their creativity in a way that cannot be replicated on any other platform or in any other medium.
- Safety and wellness—in particular for teens—is a core priority for TikTok. And as a father of two, these issues are personal for me. Today’s youth are growing up in a digital media world, and TikTok is eager to be part of the conversation about creating more robust protections.
- People come to TikTok to feel inspired, be creative, and watch uplifting content. It is not the platform of choice for individuals seeking to engage in harmful conduct. However, we also realize that threats to online platform safety are far from static. Content moderation, which is a core element of platform safety, is an exceptionally complicated, dynamic, and constantly evolving process.
- Trust must be earned through action, not words. Building trust is above all an engineering and governance effort, not a public relations exercise.
- When it comes to protecting our community, we know there’s no finish line. The industry as a whole faces dynamic and ever-evolving challenges. We will always work to deploy our teams, tools, and resources to meet them and to demonstrate our hard work and transparency.
- Oh, who am I? I grew up in Singapore. I was born there, my great-grandfather moved there many years ago. I had a typical Singaporean childhood. I wanted to see the world, because Singapore is fantastic, but it’s tiny. So I went to the UK for college. I joined Goldman Sachs, worked there for a couple of years, met an internet entrepreneur who started an investment company to invest in Facebook. So I joined him, and through that I met the guy who founded ByteDance. And in his earliest iteration, the idea was so simple, but so powerful.
- I consider myself native. I remember getting my first dialup internet connection. Remember that beep? I remember getting online for the first time. I remember that very clearly.
- Fans want to know how the music is made. They want to know about the thought process, the creative process. And this is the key thing. They don’t want this to be overproduced. They want this to be super authentic. And one of the key things that you will find on TikTok is that most of the content, everything I just told you about, has to be really authentic. If you try to make it very polished or very refined, it’s not going to be that organic. People will see through this.
- The overarching thing that we’re trying to do here is to keep the community safe and inclusive for everybody. There’s always freedom for users to express themselves if it doesn’t violate any of our guidelines. As you can imagine, this is a very complex role, and our trust and safety team is always looking into making sure that the content on the platform is not violative.
- I think as long as there have been rules, there have been people trying to bypass the rules. I think what is really important is to make sure that the spirit of what we’re trying to do is well understood, and the spirit is, “Look, we’re trying to create a platform for creativity and for joy.”
- Clearly we prioritize safety very seriously, as you can imagine. And some of it could be us being overly protective, a mis-moderation leaning on the side of being careful. Sometimes we have taken something down as an abundance of caution. The position of moderation is very important. It’s not only getting the violation rates down, it’s reducing overmoderation, which happens. It’s a price you have to pay, and you have to find the right balance.
- I think the biggest gap in understanding is between users and nonusers. This is the biggest gap.
- Every time I meet a user, I feel like the level of understanding and the conversations that we have are significantly different than with someone who’s never used it before. People who use it really understand.
- But as a company that is growing, it is important to be a little bit more visible so that people can understand us better—and we can earn the trust that we need to.
- You know that feeling when you haven’t been back in Singapore for a while? You touch down at our beautiful airport and then are hit by the humidity the minute you step out onto the street. That’s home.
- About 10 years ago, I met these founders who were building a very cool app. The idea behind it was interesting. Let’s recommend content to people based not on who they knew, but on their genuine interests. They were small then—a team of 30. But I became a user of TikTok and really connected with what it was trying to do. It brought joy to a lot of people, and that was something I was drawn to.
- The beauty of TikTok is that it is designed for everyone to be heard. If you have good content that resonates with people, they will see your video. It’s not only the users who are already famous who can grow their platform here—TikTok gives everyone a voice.
