Bytedance is incorporated in Caymen islands. Its not a Chinese owned corporation. It has subsidiary in HongKong, not mainland China. In fact, it does not have an legal entity in mainland China. Its has subsidiary in the U.S. that runs TikTok in California. The US subsidiary is managed by Americans and hires American workers. The CEO is Kevin Mayer. All TikTok's data is stored in the US, the content management and regulation team are all American employees. I know from TikTok employees that employees in Chinese office are not allowed to view U.S. stored data. The machine learning system for Tiktok and Chinese version douyin are separate. Tiktok is planning to allow outside security review of how they manage content and how the recommendation algorithm works. Legally, there is no way that Chinese laws have any jurisdiction on the U.S. subsidiary due to the fact that Bytedance is incorporated in Cayman islands. Bytedance's operations in China (Douyin and others) are managed by the Hongkong operating entity, and only these operations have to respect Chinese laws. If the Chinese government wants to get data from TikTok, the employees there can just deny them. What can the Chinese government do? Arrest them? They live in the US. Second, if Chinese government is forcing Tiktok to censor according to its own wishes, the American employees at Tiktok would have been talking by now. You think American employees would bend backwards for Chinese government?
Source: ByteDance coporeate structure: https://www.bytedance.com/en/
TikTok's statement on data practices
https://newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/fair-competition-and-trans...