A report by Reuters is alleging that TikTok,the Bytedance-owned social media app, is preparing a clone of its recommendation algorithm, specifically for 170 million US users. The move is presumably to pacify US lawmakers that are still on the path to get it banned, according to the sources with direct knowledge to the situation.
Over the past few months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers, both in the US and China, were tasked with separating millions of lines of code. The mission was to create a separate code base that would be independent of the Chinese version of the social media app, Douyin.
In April, the US House of Representatives and Senate unanimously passed a bill that forced ByteDance to sell the US segment of TikTok to a US entity or be banned from operating within the country. The social network has up to a year to find a buyer.
Sifting through millions of line of code isn’t easy and sources close to Reuters says that it is just “dirty work”, which gives an idea just how intricately entwined the code that binds the app’s US operation to its Chinese parent is. A generous estimate suggests that it could take over a year to complete the separation.
The Reuters story published today is misleading and factually inaccurate. As we said in our court filing, the ‘qualified divestiture’ demanded by the Act to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technologically, not…
— TikTok Policy (@TikTokPolicy) May 30, 2024
TikTok has seemingly and vehemently denied Reuter’s report, claiming that the story is misleading and factually inaccurate, without specifying which part of the report was incorrect.
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