BYTEDANCE WITHOUT TIKTOK

Selling TikTok U.S. could sharpen ByteDance's focus on Al, where it's already edging out rivals.

- BY NICHOLAS GORDON

TIKTOK'S LOGO was all over the October Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea, perhaps the region's most important diplomatic get-together. Videos touted the social media platform's ability to elevate creators, while an exhibition booth played a constant stream of short videos. TikTok executives onstage highlighted the billions of dollars its platform generates in Asia and promised to build "a trusted digital ecosystem." Delegates got a TikTok-branded baseball cap as part of their swag bag. TikTok creators, at a private lunch on the shores of Gyeongju's Bomun Lake, praised the platform for bringing them to an audience of hundreds of millions.

“I found my TikTok life when I became a single parent... I had to find ways to support my son,” Ryssi Avila, a Filipino singer who went viral on TikTok, told the assembled delegates. “TikTok made everything easier... It became a lifeline.”

Yet the real action involving TikTok was taking place 50 miles to the south, in Busan, where U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were locked in discussions over the future of U.S.-China trade—and, potentially, the fate of TikTok's U.S. operations.

For years, U.S. officials have warned that TikTok's Chinese ownership gives Beijing access to U.S. user data and the power to meddle in U.S. affairs by tweaking the social media platform's algorithms. Such worries led Congress to pass last year's so-called divest-or-ban law, which threatens to boot TikTok from U.S. app stores unless its owner, ByteDance, sells the app.

In September, U.S. officials announced that a consortium of American investors will be taking over TikTok's U.S. arm, saving the app's U.S. operations. Soon after Xi and Trump's meeting, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that China had endorsed the plan. (Beijing offered a more tepid response, saying it will work with Washington to “properly resolve” issues related to the app.)