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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.
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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.
