TikTok CEO goes after Zuckerberg for attacks 'disguised as patriotism'

As Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg readies to face a grilling from lawmakers, he's first being publicly blasted by the head of TikTok.

TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer in a blog post on Wednesday defended the video app and directly went after Facebook, ripping what he described as "attacks by our competitor — namely Facebook — disguised as patriotism and designed to put an end to our very presence in the U.S.," Bloomberg reports.

Zuckerberg is set to testify before Congress on Wednesday, and in his prepared remarks that Mayer was apparently responding to, he describes Facebook as a "proudly American company" while saying that "there's no guarantee our values will win out" because "China is building its own version of the internet focused on very different ideas, and they are exporting their vision to other countries," per Variety. TikTok is owned by a Chinese company, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo earlier this month said the U.S. was looking into potentially banning it due to security concerns.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Mayer in the post hits Facebook over its TikTok competitor, Instagram Reels, calling it "another copycat product" that's coming after Facebook's previous TikTok competitor, Lasso, "failed quickly." He also writes that TikTok is "not the enemy" while announcing that the company will disclose "the actual code that drives our algorithms" in what Axios describes as an "unprecedented move that could help defuse concerns from U.S. lawmakers."

The New York Times' Ben Smith described Mayer's statement on Wednesday as a "much more sophisticated piece of politics" than Facebook has offered, adding that Facebook "has settled on a kind of caricatured anti-China stance that nobody buys."