TikTok Denies Chinese Parent Preparing Divestiture

TikTok last week denied a Reuters report that it's developing an operationally independent U.S. version of the social media application that Chinese parent ByteDance could sell to a non-Chinese owner. TikTok said it continues to maintain that it's “simply not possible” commercially, legally or technologically for ByteDance to divest the popular app, as a recently enacted U.S. law requires. The platform has asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to overturn the law, which will ban the app in the U.S. if it's not sold to an entity that isn’t controlled by a foreign adversary (see 2405070049). A group of TikTok content creators have also sued, claiming the law violates their First Amendment rights (see 2405160065).