I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today.
My name is Shou Chew, and I'm the CEO of TikTok, an online community of more than 1 billion people worldwide, including well over 170 million Americans who use our app every month to create, to share, and to discover.
Although the average age on TikTok in the U.S. is over 30, we recognize that special safeguards are required to protect minors, and especially when it comes to combating all forms of CSAM.
As a father of three young children myself, I know that the issues that we're discussing today are horrific and the nightmare of every parent.
I am proud of our efforts to address the threats to young people online from a commitment to protecting them to our industry-leading policies, use of innovative technology, and significant ongoing investments in trust and safety to achieve this goal.
TikTok is vigilant about enforcing its 13 and up age policy and offers an experience for teens that is much more restrictive than you and I would have as adults.
We make careful product design choices to help make our app inhospitable to those seeking to harm teens.
Let me give you a few examples of longstanding policies that are unique to TikTok.
We didn't do them last week.
First, direct messaging is not available to any users under the age of 16. Second, accounts for people under 16 are automatically set to private along with their content.
