The owner of TikTok, ByteDance, accused Facebook of plagiarism and defamation, at the same time that they indicate that they are experiencing complex and unimaginable difficulties to transform into a global company.
The company made the comments in a statement Sunday night posted on its official account on Jinri Toutiao, a news aggregating application it also owns.
ByteDance has always been committed to becoming a global company. During this process, we have faced all kinds of complex and unimaginable difficulties, including the tense international political environment, the collision and conflict of different cultures, and plagiarism and staining from competitor Facebook.
TikTok has been criticized by the Facebook CEO in the past, accusing it of censoring the political protest.
On the other hand, while he did not mention pressure in the United States for ByteDance to sell operations in that country, Donald Trump agreed to give ByteDance 45 days to negotiate the sale to Microsoft, people familiar with the matter said on Sunday. Microsoft commented more details on their blog.
The CEO of Microsoft has not yet given details on how this purchase will be made, but the idea is that they can maintain their functionalities by altering the data privacy part: Users from Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand will be within a base different data, so they cannot be viewed from China. It is important to remember that TikTok has already lost its first market, India, and will now have to sell operations in its second market, the United States, with the risk of being blocked in that country if it does not make the sale.
The objective, at least the one they advertise, is that TikTok China does not have access to the information of users from other countries, which may apply a different privacy policy depending on the region in which the user is located. Microsoft will be the maximum owner, although other investors may enter the United States.
It is important to note that there are currently two TikToks, one in China, operated by ByteDance, and another outside of China, also by ByteDance, but with some different policies. The problem is that the TikTok outside of China still has a privacy policy that is not acceptable to the data protection laws of many countries.
Until the time approaches, we will not know how to make the purchase, by how much and under what conditions. We will have to wait the 45 day shift.
