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ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, stated through Toutaio, a news and information content platform, that it has no intention of selling TikTok.
Over the weekend, Congress approved a bill giving ByteDance nine months to sell TikTok, with the alternative of facing a ban in the United States. If a sale is in progress within the nine months, the company would have an additional three months to complete it. President Biden signed the bill into law on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Toutaio announced, “Foreign media reports that ByteDance is exploring the sale of TikTok are false. ByteDance does not plan to sell TikTok.”
TikTok responded to the bill’s signing with a statement on X:
This unconstitutional law is a TikTok ban, and we will challenge it in court. We believe the facts and the law are clearly on our side, and we will ultimately prevail. The fact is, we have invested billions of dollars to keep U.S. data safe and our platform free from outside influence and manipulation. This ban would devastate seven million businesses and silence 170 million Americans.
Even though President Biden has signed the measure into law, his reelection campaign told NBC News on Wednesday that it will continue to use TikTok for voter outreach for another year.
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), a vocal opponent of TikTok who has long campaigned against its impact, called for the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) to review TikTok back in 2019. He mentioned:
For years, we’ve allowed the Chinese Communist Party to control one of the most popular apps in America. That was dangerously shortsighted, but thankfully we are waking up to the threat China-controlled companies pose to America. We must move more quickly in the future when we encounter similar threats, because China won’t give up. There will be lawsuits, new apps, and new plots from Beijing.
In an opinion piece published in August 2023, Rubio stated that TikTok’s public-policy chief lied under oath by denying that U.S. data is stored in China. He claimed that ByteDance, TikTok’s China-based parent company, was found in October using the app to monitor American journalists.
Rubio emphasized that The New York Times reported TikTok stores Americans’ private data, including driver’s licenses, addresses, and device IDs, in China, where they can be accessed by ByteDance employees. He also mentioned that Forbes disclosed that the tax information and Social Security numbers of TikTok content creators are also stored in China.
“China’s totalitarian regime hates the United States and is bent on displacing us as the world’s greatest power,” Rubio wrote. “If TikTok users believe their sensitive data are safe in Beijing’s hands — that Beijing wouldn’t use those data to influence, coerce, extort or spy on them in the case of a geopolitical conflict — they need to think again.”
