The creator of ByteDance, the parent company of the successful social network, is stepping down from the company’s management amid Beijing’s surveillance of Internet tycoons.
In the era of brevity, short videos that are consumed en masse have found a fertile ground. A TikTok video is like a good joke: concise, witty, and gimmicky. But there must be something else behind the success of this social network because they already have more than 100,000 followers.
The magician who pulled the rabbit out of the hat is called Zhang Yiming (in the photo), he is 38 years old and a decade ago he founded ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok and its original version Douyin. His greatest achievement has been, precisely, getting a Chinese social network to be used by millions of people on this side of the world, breaking the monopoly that networks like Instagram and Snapchat enjoyed until then.
Zhang is the ninth richest person in China, according to Forbes, and in 2019 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine. In 2020, Bytedance’s profit estimate was $7 billion, as published by the British weekly The Economist.
However, Zhang leaves. The company he helped build announced just days ago that he will step down as CEO at the end of this year and focus on the company’s long-term growth strategy.
In a letter to employees made public, the TikTok founder said “leaving day-to-day responsibilities behind would allow him to have a greater impact on long-term initiatives.” He also added a few words that could either sound like an excuse or could be a burst of honesty: “The truth is that I lack some of the skills that the ideal director needs” -said Zhang-.
“I’m not very social, preferring solitary activities, like being online, reading, listening to music and daydreaming about what might be possible,” he listed. In his resignation, however, there are those who believe they have seen a call to order by the Chinese government, which has recently increased control over large Internet companies, as seen with the record fine of 2.8 billion dollars imposed. to Alibaba, the firm of Jack Ma.
“Beijing-based ByteDance has drawn the attention of regulators in recent months over violations ranging from data use to inappropriate content,” write journalists Liza Lin and Yoko Kubota in The Wall Street Journal. “In March, the antitrust regulator fined a ByteDance subsidiary a fine equivalent to about $78,000 for failing to properly disclose a previous merger. At the time, ByteDance was one of 11 companies ordered to conduct a review of security due to the use of what is known as deepfake technology, which allows the creation of hyper-realistic false videos”, add the reporters of the American newspaper.
Separately, they report, ByteDance was also one of 13 companies ordered in April by the Central Bank of China and other regulators to adhere to much stricter regulation of their data and lending practices.
In a statement collected by CNN, Brock Silvers, investment director of the Hong Kong firm Kaiyuan Capital, points out that “Zhang was a young software engineer when he suddenly found himself running a huge company in the midst of a rapidly changing market, at the while operating in an extremely complex political and regulatory environment.
For Silvers, the change in the role of the CEO of TikTok could send an alarm signal to the financial markets in the event of a possible IPO of ByteDance, which some media take for granted. According to Bloomberg, ByteDance shares are valued at $250 billion on the secondary market. With that figure, the company would be more valuable than ExxonMobil or Coca-Cola itself.
To the alleged pressures that come from Beijing are added those that worsen from Washington, especially after, a year ago, the Government of Donald Trump issued an executive order by which it was intended to ban TikTok in the United States if it did not find a buyer – Microsoft and Oracle came to sound.
The reason? Accusations that the short video social network posed a risk to national security due to the access that China could have to the personal data of American TikTok users. According to Reuters, Beijing was opposed to the forced sale of the social network and would have preferred that the application had disappeared from the United States than that it be sold.
If there are applications that access users’ personal data without their consent, the truth is that TikTok will not be the only one; the difference in this case is that world power is at stake on a hyper-connected planet.
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