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- ByteDance, the company which owns short-form video app TikTok, has come under some fire in the US because it is headquartered in China.
- The US is increasingly worried about Chinese tech firms passing on information about American citizens back to the Chinese government, and has blacklisted Chinese mobile firm Huawei earlier in 2019.
- The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the company is trying to come up with ways to distance itself from these its Chinese roots. Ideas reportedly include rebranding itself and moving to Singapore.
- A ByteDance spokesman denied that the company is considering moving or rebranding.
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TikTok is brainstorming ways to distance itself from its Chinese roots, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.
TikTok is exceptional as a Chinese social media company which has garnered huge success outside its domestic market, and broken Facebook's monopoly on social apps.
But recently TikTok has attracted both press attention and political criticism. Reports have emerged of the company censoring content it fears may anger the Chinese government, and US lawmakers have characterized it as a potential national security threat. The Journal's report suggests that this increased scrutiny is worrisome enough for TikTok's leadership to consider scrubbing its image as a Chinese company.
According to the Journal, TikTok employees have advised senior executives that the company could use a tactical rebrand to escape some of the recent scrutiny. It has already tried to blot out its Chinese roots at a user level by limiting the amount of China-made user content that appears on its app in the US, and in future the app's parent company ByteDance could decamp from Beijing to Singapore, sources also told the Journal.
ByteDance already has something of a forked strategy with its apps. The homegrown version of TikTok is called Douyin and only available in China. TikTok is only available in non-Chinese markets.
A ByteDance spokesman denied to the Journal that TikTok is considering a rebrand, that it is considering moving to Singapore, and that it screens out Chinese content in the US. He added that the company is not focused on an IPO.
"It is well known that ByteDance was founded in China. But the reality is that the TikTok app does not operate in China, and we are building out and empowering teams in the markets where it does operate. We have been very open about this," a ByteDance spokesman told Business Insider.
The Journal added that there is additional pressure from ByteDance's investors, SoftBank and Sequoia, who see a US expansion as vital to the firm's financial growth.
Despite its reported plans to distance itself from China's influence, it appears TikTok is still having to toe the line from Beijing, as one source told the Journal that when instructed the platform runs government ads free of charge.
Read the full report from the Wall Street Journal here.
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