If the U.S. House of Representatives gets its wishes, it will force ByteDance to sell off TikTok — but China isn’t buying that talk. A scathing memo published by the Chinese government’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the U.S. of upholding a “double standard” related to freedom of speech.
The Ministry’s statement urges the U.S. to “stop unreasonably suppressing” TikTok. “The United States regards freedom of speech as the foundation of the country, but treads on it under the feet of political reality,” reads the memo. “Although the First Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly stipulates ‘freedom of speech,’ political disputes and group interests have been constantly taking advantage of the form of “freedom of speech” to damage its essence.”
That strongly-worded declaration is a response to a House bill that was introduced by a bipartisan pair of reps and quickly passed through Congress’ lower chamber. If the Senate also approves the bill and President Biden signs it into law, TikTok will be effectively banned in the U.S. on the groups that it is controlled by a foreign adversary. ByteDance could get around that ban by divesting TikTok and selling it to an American-led entity.
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TikTok is urging Americans to call their Congressional reps and protest the measure, and users on the Chinese social media platform Weibo have turned “TikTok fights back” into a trending topic. But some Stateside business leaders are already acting as if the forced divestiture of TikTok is a foregone conclusion. Steven Mnuchin, the film financier who served as Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary, is assembling a team of investors to make a TikTok bid.
Another person with his eyes on TikTok is Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of Activision Blizzard. Kotick left the game publisher after its sale to Microsoft late last year, and he is now floating the idea of a TikTok acquisition among potential partners.
Even if Mnuchin or Kotick is able to push past the resistance posed by the Chinese government, a TikTok sale would not be an easy transaction to pull off. According to the Wall Street Journal, the app’s price tag is “estimated to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars.”
