Chinese Government Acquires Stake in TikTok Parent Company ByteDance
TikTok is one of the largest social media platforms on the web. The video-sharing app has over 1 billion users worldwide, and last year, it dethroned Google as the internet’s most visited website domain. However, the platform was also a source of controversy when then-US President Donald Trump attempted to ban the app over perceived national security risks.
This discourse might resume now that the Chinese government controls a stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance. While this partial ownership will not necessarily affect the TikTok app or user experience, it is one part of a more significant push for greater state control over the country’s growing technology sector.
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It’s worth noting that China’s stake in ByteDance is still relatively small, granting the state only one percent ownership over the company. However, the Chinese government also has more direct influence than its small stake would imply. The company’s subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology Co. Ltd., operates an app called Douyin, which serves as the country’s regional equivalent of TikTok. In addition to their part-ownership, the Chinese government now controls one of the three seats on the subsidiary’s board of directors. While the Chinese government has long exercised an extreme level of social media censorship, this change gives the state an unusual degree of direct control over the company’s decision-making.
This is not the first instance of ByteDance displaying a close relationship with the Chinese government. In 2019, The Washington Post reported that searching #HongKong on TikTok returned very few results related to the then-ongoing protests in the city. The publication also found that TikTok imposed strict
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