TikTok Said to Be Under National Security Review
Source: New York Times
The United States government has opened a national security review of a Chinese company’s acquisition of the American company that became TikTok, the hugely popular short-form video app, according to people briefed on the inquiry.
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, a federal panel that reviews foreign acquisitions of American firms on national-security grounds, is now reviewing the two-year-old deal after lawmakers raised concerns about TikTok’s growing influence in the United States, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was confidential.
ByteDance, a seven-year-old company based in Beijing, acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 for $800 million to $1 billion. At the time, Musical.ly, an app popular with teenagers to make homemade karaoke videos, had about 60 million users in the United States and Europe. ByteDance said it would keep Musical.ly separate from its family of Chinese apps. Less than a year later, ByteDance merged Musical.ly with its similar service, called TikTok, and the result has since become one of world’s fastest-growing apps and a global cultural phenomenon.
Over the past 12 months, TikTok’s app has been downloaded more than 750 million times, more than Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, according to the research firm Sensor Tower. “While we cannot comment on ongoing regulatory processes, TikTok has made clear that we have no higher priority than earning the trust of users and regulators in the U.S.,” a ByteDance spokesman said in an email. “Part of that effort includes working with Congress, and we are committed to doing so.” Reuters earlier reported the review by the federal panel, known as CFIUS, of the Musical.ly acquisition.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/01/technology/tiktok-national-security-review.html
One of my younger nieces and her friends were heavy musical.ly users, creating their own little videos as selfies and then editing them the way they liked to share, so I guess this TikTok thing is apparently the same concept and I expect they may have switched to that.
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