The House of Representatives voted Wednesday in favor of a measure that could lead to the forced sale or ban of video-sharing app TikTok in the United States, amid concerns that the Chinese platform could be used to monitor and target Americans manipulate.
The battle over TikTok, which says it has 170 million American users, reflects growing fears about China’s influence in the United States, especially in an election year. A nationwide ban, if it goes into effect, could pose an existential threat to one of China’s most successful internet companies.
Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post.
The bipartisan legislation, whose future will be decided in the Senate, would give TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, six months to sell the short-video platform or risk a ban on Apple’s app stores and online stores and Google. hosting services in the United States. President Biden has said he will sign the legislation into law if it passes Congress.
Here’s what you need to know about ByteDance and TikTok’s right in Congress.
– – –
What is ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok?
ByteDance was founded in 2012 from a four-bedroom apartment in northern Beijing. Its founder, Zhang Yiming, was then a 29-year-old software engineer turned entrepreneur whose vision was to use big data and machine learning to analyze and manage content based on user preferences.
ByteDance is sometimes called the “app factory,” given how prolific it has been in recent years. One of ByteDance’s first and most popular products is the AI-powered news aggregator Jinri Toutiao, which is largely used in China. In 2016, the company launched the short video app Douyin, which is also extremely popular in China. In 2017, the company launched the international version of that app, known as TikTok.
TikTok is widely seen as the first Chinese app to go global, and ByteDance, which was valued at $268 billion in December, as one of China’s most successful internet companies. A TikTok press release last May stated that about 60 percent of ByteDance “is owned by global institutional investors such as Carlyle Group, General Atlantic and Susquehanna International Group,” while about 20 percent is owned by “ByteDance employees across the world” and the rest is owned by the founder.
– – –
Why is ByteDance controversial in the United States?
TikTok has become a target of some US lawmakers, who see it as a potential national security threat amid deteriorating relations between Washington and Beijing.
ByteDance has repeatedly said it has never shared U.S. user data with Chinese authorities, but U.S. lawmakers point out that the company could be required to turn over information to the government under Chinese law. Lawmakers have not yet provided any evidence of TikTok’s alleged national security risks.
During a March 2023 hearing before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said that TikTok “as an American company incorporated in the United States, it is subject to the laws of the United States,” and has made efforts to address the issues to deal with. US authorities’ concerns “about TikTok’s legacy.”
“Let me say this unequivocally: ByteDance is not an agent of China or any other country,” he said in a statement.
The company has sought approval for its US subsidiary to manage and oversee “protected US user data and the systems that power TikTok” in the United States, under an initiative known as ‘Project Texas’. The subsidiary, called TikTok US Data Security, would report to an independent board, not TikTok’s or ByteDance’s leadership, TikTok said. Under the plan, which has not been approved by U.S. authorities, data from U.S. users would be stored by Austin-based tech company Oracle, with the ability to “interact with the global TikTok service in controlled and controlled ways.”
Some experts have warned that a forced sale or ban, if passed, could land in US courts. As The Washington Post previously reported, a separate attempt by President Donald Trump to enforce a ban on TikTok sales in 2020 was blocked by federal courts, which ruled that the government had not sufficiently proven that the app posed a threat to the constituted national security.
ByteDance’s products are also under increased scrutiny from Chinese authorities. In 2018, it was forced to shut down an app reserved for pranks called Neihan Duanzi, which had created a cult following but was seen as “vulgar” by regulators. Zhang publicly apologized for failing to “promote positive energy and understand the proper guidance of public opinion.”
– – –
Who is the founder of ByteDance?
Zhang, the soft-spoken founder of ByteDance, grew up in the city of Longyan in China’s southwestern Fujian province. He studied software engineering at Nankai University in Tianjin, where he repaired other students’ computers and set up websites for extra money.
After graduating, Zhang worked on an airline ticket search engine and a microblogging platform before joining Microsoft. He left after six months because he was ‘bored’, according to an interview he gave in 2014. After Microsoft, he founded a real estate platform before starting ByteDance.
In a 2015 speech, Zhang said the idea for ByteDance came about when he noticed fewer people were reading newspapers on the subway. He said he realized that phones would become the primary means of distributing information, and that demand for personalization would skyrocket.
Zhang has said he hopes his company can be as global as Google, but acknowledged the challenges in a 2017 interview. “If Chinese companies go abroad, they can overcome cultural problems, will the overseas market be huge? “I am both optimistic and pessimistic about this,” he said.
– – –
What is his relationship with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew?
Relatively little information is publicly available about the relationship between Zhang and Chew, who became CEO of TikTok in 2021.
In May 2021, Zhang announced in a letter to employees that he would step down as CEO of ByteDance to focus less on day-to-day management and more on long-term strategy. Liang Rubo, co-founder of ByteDance, was announced as the new CEO of ByteDance.
Last month, Chew told The Post that he is responsible for all of TikTok’s strategic decisions. But he said he regularly updates Liang on “certain topics that I think he has an interesting point of view on, just to make sure the perspective is complete.”
As The Post previously reported, Chew, a Singaporean citizen who grew up in Singapore, studied economics in the United Kingdom before working at Goldman Sachs for two years. He then moved to the United States to obtain his master’s degree from Harvard Business School. While studying there, Chew interned at Facebook, now a bitter competitor to TikTok.
Chew has said he first became aware of DST Global, a venture capital firm that bet on big tech companies including Facebook and Twitter, while working at Goldman Sachs. After graduating from Harvard, he worked as a partner at DST Global, where he helped coordinate one of the early investments in ByteDance by building relationships with its founders, Zhang and Liang.
– – –
Drew Harwell, Helier Cheung and Lyric Li contributed to this report.
related content
The Taliban once destroyed televisions. Now it encourages YouTubers to promote its image.
This agency is tasked with keeping AI safe. His offices are crumbling.
The US is flowing weapons to Israel despite growing alarm over its wartime behavior