The Chinese parent of TikTok faces a growing backlash at home, compounding the company’s problems as the Trump administration increases pressure on the hugely popular social media app.
President Donald Trump on Friday issued an executive order requiring ByteDance to complete a sale of TikTok’s US operation within 90 days. The company is in talks with Microsoft over a deal.
That has prompted anger among users and observers in China that the internet group will bow to US pressure at a time of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.
“ByteDance will never be able to stand up straight again after it bent the knee” to the US government, wrote one user on China’s Twitter-like Weibo service. “We have no sympathy for cowards.”
Analysts said the demand from the US government had put ByteDance in an awkward position as it sought to negotiate a deal for its American business without alienating its audience in China. Douyin — TikTok’s brand name in China — had 613m active users by July, up from 20m three years ago.
“ByteDance has pleased neither China nor the US,” said a Beijing-based executive at a rival internet company. ByteDance “is running the risk of underselling TikTok and losing popularity in its home country”.
Beijing-based ByteDance has been at pains to try and adapt its business model for international markets as it has expanded outside of China.
Like many privately owned Chinese companies, ByteDance has a Communist party committee headed by an executive who is responsible for ensuring that all text and video content conforms to restrictions set out by the party, such as avoiding politically sensitive subject matter. It employs an army of censors that assists in filtering out content deemed taboo.
But TikTok, which encompasses ByteDance’s operations outside of China, is given much more autonomy and is largely run by non-Chinese staff. TikTok in May appointed former Disney executive Kevin Mayer as its chief executive. The app also prevents users in mainland China from accessing its content, which is not policed to the same level as in China.
ByteDance has fallen foul of Beijing in the past. It shut down its popular Neihan Duanzi app in 2018 after vulgar jokes and videos on the platform displeased Chinese regulators.
Analysts said that ByteDance’s announcement last week that it could legally challenge a separate executive order from the Trump administration was partly intended to show the Chinese public it was fighting back against US actions. The company has said it wants to ensure “the rule of law is not discarded” and its users are “treated fairly”.
But “the threat of legal action suggests ByteDance leadership is panicking”, said Zhuang Bo, an analyst at TS Lombard.
However, other commentators noted that ByteDance probably has few options but to sell its business given the level of pressure being exerted by Washington, raising the possibility of further backlash in China.
“Selling Tiktok’s US operation at a reasonable price is the only choice for ByteDance,” wrote Zhu Ning, a professor at the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance, in an article posted online last week.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiP2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmZ0LmNvbS9jb250ZW50LzYxOTg4ZDJkLTRjOTUtNGEzNS04MjczLWQ2OTgwYWYwNDExNNIBP2h0dHBzOi8vYW1wLmZ0LmNvbS9jb250ZW50LzYxOTg4ZDJkLTRjOTUtNGEzNS04MjczLWQ2OTgwYWYwNDExNA?oc=5
2020-08-16 11:31:00Z
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