a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok's parent company.' What Are the Concerns About China's Influence Through TikTok?

In November last year, the chair of ByteDance-the company's co-founder Zhang Yiming-stepped down a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China's tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.īyteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin-the Chinese version of TikTok-and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.īut the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP 'is mistaken. TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.Īlthough ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government. TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. Instead, an almost identical sister app called Douyin, owned by the same company, is used there and has more than 300 million users, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. Indonesia had the second-largest audience with around 99 million TikTok users, while Brazil came in third with 74 million users.Īlthough TikTok is Chinese-owned, it is not available in China.

made up the largest base of TikTok users as of April 2022, with some 136.5 million Americans engaging with the app. How Many Users Does TikTok Have Around the World?Īccording to data compiled by statistics site Statista, the U.S. Then a $1 billion merger with another video-sharing site called Musical.ly in 2018 made it available globally and it has grown exponentially since then to become the fourth most popular social media platform after Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, according to Influencer Marketing Hub. The Chinese version of the app, Douyin, was launched in China in 2016, with the international version TikTok launched the following year. Douyin is the name of ByteDance’s main moneymaker, a video app similar to TikTok but only available in mainland China.The TikTok logo loomed large at the company's booth during the Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, Japan, last month. So in May, in an effort to lessen the confusion between the China-based ByteDance entity and the offshore one, the company changed the China unit’s name from Beijing ByteDance Technology to Beijing Douyin Information Service, according to a person with direct knowledge of its internal discussions.

That argument didn’t seem to make a difference in the eyes of ByteDance’s critics. ByteDance, which is headquartered in Beijing, has repeatedly said the China business is separate from ByteDance Ltd., an offshore entity that wholly owns TikTok, a viral video app that has more than 1 billion monthly active users. and elsewhere have fanned fears that the Chinese government holds dominion over TikTok too. Since The Information reported last year that the Chinese government had quietly taken a stake and a board seat in a key Chinese corporate entity of ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, politicians in the U.S.

Who currently owns tiktok