By Adedapo Adesanya
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, said it has no plans to sell the social media platform after President Joe Biden signed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of the wildly popular app.
This company made this known in its first official response on the issue since President Biden signed the bill after US lawmakers set the nine-month deadline on national security grounds, alleging that TikTok can be used by the Chinese government for espionage and propaganda as long as ByteDance owns it.
The Information, a tech-focused US news site, reported that ByteDance was looking at scenarios for selling TikTok without the powerful secret algorithm that recommends videos to its more than one billion users globally.
ByteDance has now denied it was considering a sale.
“Foreign media reports about ByteDance exploring the sale of TikTok are untrue,” the company posted Thursday on Toutiao, a Chinese-language platform it owns.
“ByteDance does not have any plans to sell TikTok.”
TikTok has been a political and diplomatic hot potato for years, first finding itself in the crosshairs of former president Donald Trump’s administration, which tried unsuccessfully to ban it.
It has forcefully denied any link to the Chinese government and said it has not and will not share US user data with Beijing.
TikTok says it has also spent around $1.5 billion on “Project Texas”, under which US user data would be stored in the United States.
Its critics say the data is only part of the problem, and that the TikTok recommendation algorithm — the “secret sauce” for its success — must also be disconnected from ByteDance.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has said the company will take the fight against the new law to the courts, but some experts believe that for the US Supreme Court, national security considerations could outweigh free speech protection.
US lawmakers have long been concerned about China’s influence over the app. In particular, they worry that TikTok could share data with the Chinese government or manipulate content displayed on its platform. So far, there’s little evidence to support these concerns.
But as a China-based company, ByteDance is subject to many national intelligence, data security, and cybersecurity laws.
In 2018, China amended its National Intelligence Law, which requires any organisation or citizen to support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence work. That means ByteDance is legally bound to help with gathering intelligence.
As a result, several countries including India have banned officials from downloading TikTok onto their phones, but the US law is one of the most sweeping measures taken so far.