Congress has yet to demand the government produce an honest public disclosure about what exactly the divestiture actually changed. Because according to Marco Rubio in 2024, so long as ByteDance owns the TikTok algorithm, China has U.S. user data.
"The reason why TikTok is so attractive, its value, is it has an algorithm, a recommender engine, which is one of the best in the world. That is owned by ByteDance. Under Chinese law, ByteDance must own it. And the only way that that recommender engine works is if they have access to the data. So it doesn't matter who you sell TikTok to, where they're headquartered, it doesn't even matter where they store the data. As long as ByteDance engineers in China have access to that data, control the algorithm, they have to have access to American data to make it work. And that's what we need to confront. That's the reality."
๐ฌ Discussion
Congress has yet to demand the government produce an honest public disclosure about what exactly the divestiture actually changed. Because according to Marco Rubio in 2024, so long as ByteDance owns the TikTok algorithm, China has U.S. user data.