Skip to main content

ByteDance CEO confirms U.S. will force TikTok sale

In a letter to employees, the CEO of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, appeared to confirm that the company might break off its U.S. operations.

First reported by the Chinese news outlet Pandaily, Zhang’s letter confirmed that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had decided ByteDance must sell TikTok’s U.S. operations.

“For nearly the past year, we have fully cooperated with CFIUS’ review of our musical.ly acquisition from 2017 [Musical.ly was TikTok’s predecessor],” Zhang wrote in an official English translation of the letter. “Although we have made it clear that we are a private company and that we are willing to take additional technical measures needed to further address any concern, CFIUS determined that ByteDance must fully divest TikTok’s U.S. operations.”

“We disagree with CFIUS’ conclusion because we have always been committed to user safety, platform neutrality, and transparency,” Zhang continued. “However, we understand their decision in the current macro environment. To help resolve these issues, we initiated preliminary discussions with a tech company to help clear the way for us to continue offering the TikTok app in the U.S.”

Zhang said that ByteDance is not giving up on exploring possibilities other than a sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations, and will work to make sure that in the end, TikTok can still serve American users, the Chinese outlet PingWest reported.

The committee is a part of the U.S. Treasury Department that looks at any national security issues that might arise from foreign investments coming into U.S. companies. President Donald Trump and members of his administration have spent weeks attacking Tik Tok as a potential national security threat, arguing that the app could potentially send information on users to the Chinese government.

Experts have raised concerns about the amount of data that TikTok collects from its users, as well as the fact that ByteDance is a Chinese company, which raises questions about whether the Chinese government is spying on users. No conclusive evidence that this is happening has been presented, but the Department of Homeland Security and several private U.S. companies have already released guidelines forbidding employees from installing the app on their work phones.

On August 2, Microsoft confirmed rumors that had been swirling for more than a week: That it was looking at buying Tik Tok’s U.S. arm, and that it was working with the U.S. government to do so.

CFIUS has not yet responded to a request for comment. A spokesperson for ByteDance did not confirm or deny the existence of the letter to Digital Trends, and said in a short statement, “TikTok will be here for many years to come.”

Editors' Recommendations

Maya Shwayder
I'm a multimedia journalist currently based in New England. I previously worked for DW News/Deutsche Welle as an anchor and…
You can now downvote comments on TikTok videos
The TikTok app on a smartphone's screen. The smartphone is sitting on a white table.

TikTok has a new feature and this time it's for the comment section of its short-form videos.

On Friday, TikTok announced via a tweet that it was globally releasing a new dislike button feature for TikTok video comments. The tweeted announcement offered up a few details about what to expect and an image of the new feature:

Read more
TikTok is banning campaign fundraising on its app
A person's hand holding a phone with the TikTok app on it.

As we get closer to the U.S. midterm elections, TikTok and other social media platforms have been ramping up changes to their apps and their policies in an effort to curb misinformation and clean up other problems plaguing their platforms. And now, TikTok is issuing a few more changes to its policies that are specifically targeted at political party, politician, and government TikTok accounts. The biggest change? It plans to ban campaign fundraising on the app.

On Wednesday, TikTok published a blog post in which it announced a ban on campaign fundraising and mandatory verification for certain political accounts (in the U.S.).

Read more
This beloved TikTok hashtag just got its own app feature
The TikTok app on a smartphone's screen. The smartphone is sitting on a white table.

A popular hashtag-turned-online-community has its own TikTok feature now.

On Tuesday, TikTok launched a new feature that is dedicated to #BookTok, a hashtag and TikTok community that is centered around discussing books. The new feature allows TikTok users to add links to books in their videos. According to TikTok's blog post announcement about the feature, when users select the links that are posted in the TikTok videos they're watching, the links will open up "a dedicated page with details about the book, including a brief summary. and a collection of other videos that linked the same title." The feature also allows users to save book titles to their profiles' Favorites tab.

Read more