TikTok intends to exhaust all legal avenues before considering any type of divestment from its parent company if the legislative project that would veto the use of the application in the United States if the Chinese company ByteDance does not divest from the platform finally becomes law. social, people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.
The sale of the viral video app is considered a last resort for ByteDance, the sources said, adding that no plan is final and will depend on how the legislation moves forward.
Likewise, a divestment from ByteDance would also require approval from the Chinese government, which said last year that it would strongly oppose a forced sale.
The bill, introduced by a key committee last week, needs to be approved in a vote in the US House of Representatives this Wednesday before it can move forward into law.
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, of the opinion that TikTok, with more than 100 million users in the country, represents a risk to internal security, has announced that he will sign the law to prohibit its use if the project goes ahead in Congress.
A TikTok spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s plans. The legislation “has a predetermined outcome: a complete ban on TikTok in the United States,” the spokesperson said.
“In recent years, although the United States has never found evidence that TikTok threatens US national security, it has never stopped suppressing it,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Wednesday.
“This bullying practice disrupts the normal business activities of companies, damages the confidence of international investors” and “undermines the normal international economic and trade order, which will eventually prove counterproductive for the United States itself,” he added.
For his part, the Republican candidate for the United States elections, former President Donald Trump, warned this week that banning TikTok would give more power to Meta, a platform from which he was expelled as a result of the January 6 riots, stating that “Facebook is an enemy of the people.”
In this sense, while Trump has acknowledged that TikTok could pose a risk to the national security of the United States, he has also been reluctant to promote a ban that could make Facebook “double in size.”
Trump’s current opinion on this matter is far from what his administration defended back in 2020 when he unsuccessfully tried to remove the social network from the catalog of mobile applications. The former president subsequently ordered TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it within 90 days.
Since then, the operation remains unrealized and at the end of 2022, the United States Congress carried out a legislative project to prohibit its use on mobile devices provided by the Federal Government due to fear that China could use the application to collect personal data. .
