When asked during a US congressional hearing in March last year if a Chinese official was on the Beijing ByteDance Technology board, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew said “I believe so”. Incorporated in the Cayman Islands, ByteDance also lists General Atlantic among its investors. Three of the five members of ByteDance’s board are Americans, according to TikTok. TikTok has said around 60 percent of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock.
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- Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have jabbed at each other in public, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against one another.
- And Bytedance’s news services inevitably risk running into the same algorithmic pitfalls that have plagued Facebook for years; the company’s apps have been accused of spreading fake news in countries such as India and beyond.
- Since it launched in 2012, Toutiao has accumulated hundreds of millions of daily active users who are hooked on its personalized blend of articles.
- According to Baker-White, this misuse of data included spying on her and other users’ IP addresses in an attempt to track an internal mole at the company who was thought to be in contact with reporters.
Bytedance is, in fact, locked in a fierce rivalry with Tencent, in particular. Zhang and Tencent founder Pony Ma have jabbed at each other in public, and the companies have filed multiple lawsuits against one another. TikTok is banned from government employees’ work phones in the United States and several other nations including Australia and Canada over security concerns.
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TikTok later claimed that a “moderation error” caused the ban and offered Aziz an apology. ByteDance, Chinese technology company that developed novel video-sharing social networking applications, most notably TikTok. ByteDance also serves as the parent company of several popular social media and news apps. It also has others like TopBuzz, a platform that recommends trending videos and articles to users, and BaBe, a news aggregation app in Indonesia. The Chinese giant is now one of the most valuable private technology firms in the world, reportedly worth $75 billion, and owns a variety of apps from news aggregators to social media services.
Earlier this year, ByteDance acquired some patents and the team behind a Chinese smartphone brand called Smartisan. A spokesperson for ByteDance declined to comment on the financial figures when contacted by CNBC.
But with such a large number of engaged users and a steep upward trajectory, it also shouldn’t have too much trouble finding ways to turn a profit. Linux OS providers Red Hat and Debian have issued security advisories warning users about the threat. With 2,400 staff representing 100 different nationalities, AFP covers the world as a leading global news agency. AFP provides fast, comprehensive and verified coverage of the issues affecting our daily lives. A Chinese state-owned entity owns 1 percent of Douyin, according to the ByteDance website. TikTok has said this is a requirement under Chinese law and does not impact ByteDance’s international operations.
House Committee on Energy and Commerce to address accusations that the app is a threat to American national security. Chew downplayed any connection to or favouritism toward China’s government and elaborated on the steps the company planned to take to better protect the data of American users. Despite this reassurance, the U.S. state of Montana passed a law to ban the app in the state. Increased regulatory barriers were also introduced against the company because of tensions between the United States and China. National security concerns about the collection of user data led the U.S. government to ban the app from being installed on government-issued devices.
TikTok owner ByteDance is a $75 billion Chinese tech giant — here’s what you need to know about it
ByteDance launched TikTok in 2017, and the app took the world by storm, crossing a billion users in four years. In March, its subsidiary Lark Technologies launched a product called Lark, a productivity and workplace collaboration tool. “Although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, describing the bill as “bullying”. The company says it now routes all of its US traffic through infrastructure in the United States, and that it is deleting previously collected data.
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TikTok is banned from government employees’ work phones in the United States and several other nations including Australia and Canada over security concerns. With TikTok, rebranded from the joining of Musical.ly and Douyin, Bytedance has a global hit. The company says it racked up more downloads in forex broker rating the US than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube in both September and October, and TikTok now has over half a billion people worldwide using it monthly. The app has been downloaded nearly 80 million times in the US, with even the likes of Jimmy Fallon giving it high-profile endorsements.
Helo, for example, is a similar product aimed at India with support for 14 local vernaculars, and TopBuzz does a similar thing in English. But so far, its highest-profile efforts in Western markets have focused on creative communities. The company bought short movie-making app Flipagram last year and rebranded it as Vigo Video, then followed up by acquiring Musical.ly to merge with its similar service Douyin. The app was an international version of Douyin, which was released in China in 2016 and now has hundreds of millions of users. Tencent is the most valuable company of any sort in Asia, but Bytedance has beaten it to the punch with TikTok, allowing it to claim a degree of greater influence on the wider social networks of the world.
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A privately held company, ByteDance does not release revenue and profit figures, but media estimates of its earnings put it on par with some of the biggest firms in the world. ByteDance has rocketed in recent years to become one of the most valuable companies in the world, worth around $225 billion, according to market intelligence firm CP Insights. “Although the United States has never found prtrend evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has not stopped suppressing TikTok,” foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said, describing the bill as “bullying”. It has also said that Douyin employees do not have access to TikTok’s US user data. TikTok’s CEO has told Congress that the firm has never been asked by the Chinese government for US user data nor has it provided it.
/ Sign up for Verge Deals to get deals on products we’ve tested sent to your inbox weekly. The Chinese commerce ministry published rules in 2020 that added “civilian use” to a list of technologies fxpcm that are restricted for export. A large number of US lawmakers — Republicans and Democrats — are not convinced that TikTok is independent of Beijing despite being headquartered outside China.
ByteDance’s founders have a 20 per cent stake, and the remainder is held by employees, according to TikTok. TikTok has said around 60 per cent of ByteDance is owned by institutional investors including US giant BlackRock. AFP, along with more than 100 fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok and Facebook parent Meta to verify videos that potentially contain false information. The Chinese company says it has more than 150,000 employees in almost 120 cities around the world. The spokesperson declined to comment on the music streaming product report when contacted by CNBC. However, a spokesperson for ByteDance said that it is not working on a smartphone — but it is developing other hardware related to education.
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