TikTok’s Beijing-based owner ByteDance denied media reports of selling the platform as the company faces a mandate to either divest the firm or be banned from the United States.
“Foreign media reports that ByteDance is exploring the sale of TikTok are untrue,” the company said in an April 25 statement on news aggregation app Toutiao, according to CNN. “ByteDance doesn’t have any plan to sell TikTok.”
The article claimed that the sale would not include the video recommendation algorithm. ByteDance reportedly preferred to sell TikTok to businesses outside the tech industry, it said.
The deadline for the sale is Jan. 19, 2025, just before the next U.S. president is sworn in. The president can extend the deadline by a maximum of three months to facilitate the deal’s completion.
A key concern that drove the attempt to prohibit TikTok in the United States was that the app is linked with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
This creates a risk that the private data of individual American citizens may end up in the hands of the regime, which can then be used for nefarious purposes and harm national security, according to experts.
TikTok insists it has invested billions of dollars to “keep U.S. data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation.”
However, the CCP’s counterespionage law requires that Chinese companies, including ByteDance, must hand over data on American users to Beijing when the authorities make such a request.
TikTok has proposed to store data of Americans at Texas-based Oracle in a bid to allay security concerns.
TikTok and the CCP
While ByteDance claims it keeps data on Americans safe and free from outside influence, former employees say otherwise.In a recent interview with Fortune, Evan Turner, who worked as a senior data scientist at TikTok from April to September 2022, said he was initially assigned to a ByteDance executive in Beijing.
After the firm announced its initiative to store American user data in the United States, he was reassigned to a U.S.-based manager in Seattle. However, this reassignment was only on paper. He continued working with the Beijing executive.
His job entailed emailing spreadsheets containing data of hundreds of thousands of American users to ByteDance’s employees in Beijing. The information included names, IP addresses, email IDs, and geographic details.
“I literally worked on a project that gave U.S. data to China,” he said. “They were completely complicit in that. There were Americans that were working in upper management that were completely complicit in this.”
Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, commander of U.S. Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency, and chief of the Central Security Service, pointed out that “one-third of the adult population receives their news from this app, one-sixth of our children are saying they’re constantly on this app.”
“If you consider that there [are] 150 million people every single day that are obviously touching this app, this provides a foreign nation a platform for information operations, a platform for surveillance, and a concern we have with regards to who controls that data.”
John F. Plumb, assistant secretary of defense for space policy and principal cyber adviser to the secretary of defense, highlighted the issue of global Chinese cyber intrusions, which he said were “the most prolific in the world.”
“In [a] crisis, PRC [People’s Republic of China] leaders believe that achieving information dominance will enable them to seize and keep the strategic initiative, disrupt our ability to mobilize, to project and sustain the joint force, and to ensure the PRC’s desired end state.”
