
Trump to Order China’s ByteDance to Sell TikTok in U.S. - coloneltcb
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-31/trump-to-order-china-s-bytedance-to-sell-tiktok-u-s-operations
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russli1993
Bytedance is incorporated in Caymen islands. Its not a Chinese owned
corporation. It has subsidiary in HongKong, not mainland China. In fact, it
does not have an legal entity in mainland China. Its has subsidiary in the
U.S. that runs TikTok in California. The US subsidiary is managed by Americans
and hires American workers. The CEO is Kevin Mayer. All TikTok's data is
stored in the US, the content management and regulation team are all American
employees. I know from TikTok employees that employees in Chinese office are
not allowed to view U.S. stored data. The machine learning system for Tiktok
and Chinese version douyin are separate. Tiktok is planning to allow outside
security review of how they manage content and how the recommendation
algorithm works. Legally, there is no way that Chinese laws have any
jurisdiction on the U.S. subsidiary due to the fact that Bytedance is
incorporated in Cayman islands. Bytedance's operations in China (Douyin and
others) are managed by the Hongkong operating entity, and only these
operations have to respect Chinese laws. If the Chinese government wants to
get data from TikTok, the employees there can just deny them. What can the
Chinese government do? Arrest them? They live in the US. Second, if Chinese
government is forcing Tiktok to censor according to its own wishes, the
American employees at Tiktok would have been talking by now. You think
American employees would bend backwards for Chinese government?

Source: ByteDance coporeate structure:
[https://www.bytedance.com/en/](https://www.bytedance.com/en/) TikTok's
statement on data practices [https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-
competition-and-trans...](https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-competition-
and-transparency-benefits-us-all)

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abouelatta
To whom though? After the anti-trust hearing its hard to imagine they would
let fb acquire it. Twitter and snap cant afford it. Are PE the best people to
run Tiktok?I understand the premise, I just don't understand how they can go
about it. It really seems facebook is perhaps the only company that can afford
Tiktok at this point.

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eunos
I think it will be sold to VCs. A few days ago the value is about 50B

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985525](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985525)

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28278
How greedy. Seems like the US is saying that only America gets to profit from
the American market. Having lost the domestic automobile market to Japan &
manufacturing to China, they're determined not to let it happen again with
tech.

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bigpumpkin
The entire Tiktok app? or just the US portion.

