US Congress has taken a first step to forcing the app’s Chinese owner to sell it off. Can the company fight back?
Already a subscriber?The day after American legislators voted overwhelmingly to force the Chinese owner of TikTok to sell the video-sharing app, its chief executive Shou Zi Chew expressed confusion.
Chew decried the outcome, which had support from both Republicans and Democrats, as “very disappointing”. TikTok had itself helped create some of the momentum behind that support. Over the week leading up to the vote, many politicians were furious when TikTok used its own app to help subscribers register complaints with their congressional representatives.House legislators also received a series of classified briefings by intelligence officials that observers said helped boost support for the bill.
But it’s not clear whether the senators ready to support the measure number 60, the figure that would make it immune from some procedural mechanisms to block its passage.The more complicated path in the Senate has convinced TikTok’s top executives that senators will not back the House bill. “It looks like it’s gonna die in the Senate,” says one person familiar with the Chinese company’s strategy.
Some believe the company might have avoided this completely had Chew made similar overtures to his most hostile critics after testifying before Congress in March last year. “What you needed to do was get people like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio to come out and claim victory by offering them a deal that they could claim as a victory,” says the ByteDance insider.
The Chinese government has made clear that it does not want ByteDance to divest TikTok, and most people close to ByteDance insist that the company will not sell even if Congress tries to force it. While things are heading in a tough direction for TikTok in the US, there’s little evidence that the pressure will lead other countries to follow suit, in the same way that some American allies targeted Huawei.
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