Chinese owner denies it’s willing to sell TikTok as US ban looms
CNN
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance said Thursday that it has no plans to sell the social media platform, its first official response on the fraught issue since President Joe Biden signed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of the wildly popular app.
TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance said Thursday that it has no plans to sell the social media platform, its first official response on the fraught issue since President Joe Biden signed a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban of the wildly popular app. “Foreign media reports that ByteDance is exploring the sale of TikTok are untrue,” the Beijing-based company said in a statement on Toutiao, a news aggregation app that it owns and is popular in mainland China. “ByteDance doesn’t have any plan to sell TikTok,” it said. The statement was in direct response to an article by the Information on Thursday that said Bytedance was exploring scenarios for selling TikTok’s US business without the algorithm that recommends videos to TikTok users. In the statement, Bytedance attached screenshots of the Information’s report, which cited three people with knowledge of deliberations. Until now Beijing-based ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and a host of other apps, had remained quiet on this week’s legislation in the US pushing for a forced sale. Chinese authorities have also been muted since the bill was signed into law despite Beijing previously making clear it would oppose any such measure.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”