Since the start of 2023, several high-level executives from TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance have been transferred to its American branch. This makes it harder for TikTok lobbyists to argue China has no oversight of American TikTok data and operations, which has been crucial for making the case to Congress.
The personnel from ByteDance dispatched to America this year included executives from its Beijing headquarters, according to an exclusive report by The Wall Street Journal. They have mainly taken positions in advancement and profitmaking, overseeing advertising, human resources, monetization, and e-commerce. Entire teams have been brought over from Beijing to serve the executives overtaking these vast portions of TikTok operations.
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According to the Journal, American TikTok employees have confessed concern about these changes, and said they reflect an increasingly greater presence of ByteDance in the company than what is publicly shared.
Like all companies in China, ByteDance is mandated by law to establish branches of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) within its offices, hire CCP members as executives, and accept Chinese government investments. Controversy was caused by past leaks of internal audio from TikTok meetings, where employees openly discuss China’s repeated access of U.S. user data.
State intervention in private companies has been expanded and accelerated by Chinese President Xi Jinping. In 2017, his administration introduced a new intelligence law requiring all organizations and citizens to “support and cooperate in intelligence work.” This law, and the fact that Chinese government personnel regularly infiltrate corporate bureaucracies, have given Western government grounds to ban products from certain Chinese companies.
However, TikTok has been able to get away from a ban thus far based on the claim that the U.S. branch does not have any Chinese state influence. The corporate lobbyists and advocacy groups funded by libertarian Jeff Yass have used this argument, along with an argument from free speech grounds, to justify its continued proliferation of American smartphones and markets.
When asked, a spokesperson from TikTok claimed the company has not downplayed overlap between ByteDance and the American offices, arguing that it is very common for transfers of staff to occur in a large corporation.
However, internal TikTok documents reported on by Gizmodo revealed company leaders instructing new hires to do precisely that. “Downplay the parent company ByteDance,” one document read, and another said “Downplay the China association.” The TikTok spokesperson tried to justify this by saying it was never a company policy.
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