TikTok owner guarantees she has no plans to sell application despite US ultimatum – Technology

Chinese company ByteDance guaranteed this Friday that it has no intention of selling TikTok, despite Washington threatening to ban the video platform in the United States if it does not cut ties with China.

US President Joe Biden on Wednesday signed a law that gives ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok (with a possible three-month extension if the deal is underway), otherwise it will be excluded from Apple and Google stores in North American territory.

“ByteDance has no plans to sell TikTok,” the company said today on Toutiao, a Chinese social network it also owns.

Bytedance also clarified that “there is nothing true” about rumors that the company was exploring options to sell TikTok without the algorithm used by the application.

At the beginning of the week, TikTok had already announced that it would initiate legal action to block the legislation, which it considers unconstitutional.

“We will continue to fight for your rights in the courts. The facts and the Constitution are on our side and we hope to prevail”, assured today the leader of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, born in Singapore.

With short videos, TikTok, which has attracted more than 1.5 billion users worldwide, has been accused for several years in the United States and Europe of causing addictive behavior among teenagers.

On Wednesday, TikTok suspended a feature that rewards screen time, due to the risk of increasing addiction, after the European Commission opened an investigation and threatened to suspend the application.

The Republican Party also accused the video platform of allowing Beijing to spy on and manipulate Americans.

This is because a 2017 Chinese law requires local companies to hand over personal data that may be of interest to national security, upon request from authorities.

On Saturday, TikTok said that a possible ban on the platform in the United States would “violate the freedom of expression” of its 170 million users in the country.

An application spokesperson added that the law would “devastate seven million companies and close a platform that contributes 24 billion dollars (22.4 billion euros) per year to the North American economy”, in a ‘ email’ sent to the France-Press news agency.

The possible banning of Tik Tok was one of the counterparts accepted by Democrats to obtain Republican support for a new military aid package worth 61 billion dollars (57 billion euros) to Ukraine.

At the end of March, Taiwan, which had already banned TikTok on government devices, declared the platform a “threat to national security” due to “substantial control” by “hostile foreign actors”.