The work on splitting the source code ordered by TikTok’s
Chinese parent ByteDance late last year predated a bill to force a sale of
TikTok's U.S. operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The
bill was signed into law in April.
The sources, who were granted anonymity because they are not
authorized to speak publicly about the short-form video sharing app, said that
once the code is split, it could lay the groundwork for a divestiture of the
U.S. assets, although there are no current plans to do so.
The company has previously said it had no plans to sell the
U.S. assets and such a move would be impossible.
TikTok initially declined to comment. After publication of
this story, TikTok in a posting on X said "The Reuters story published
today is misleading and factually inaccurate," without specifying what was
inaccurate.
TikTok also posted a passage from its federal lawsuit:
"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 legally. And certainly not on the
270-day timeline required by the Act."
"We stand by our reporting," a Reuters
spokesperson said.
TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance sued in U.S.
federal court in May, seeking to block the law forcing a sale or ban of the app
by Jan. 19. A U.S. appeals court on Tuesday set a fast-track schedule to
consider the legal challenges to the new law.
MILLIONS OF LINES OF CODE
In the past few months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok
engineers in both the U.S. and China were ordered to begin separating millions
of lines of code, sifting through the company’s algorithm that pairs users with
videos to their liking. The engineers’ mission is to create a separate code
base that is independent of systems used by ByteDance’s Chinese version of
TikTok, Douyin, while eliminating any information linking to Chinese users, two
sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters.
The previously unreported plan provides a rare look into
what a technical separation of TikTok's U.S. operations could be like, and
shows to what lengths TikTok will go to address the bipartisan political risk
it faces. U.S. President Biden and other supporters of the law argue TikTok
gives Beijing far too much access to reams of data, information that could be
used to spy on or influence TikTok’s U.S. users.
Reuters previously reported that a sale of the app with
algorithms is highly unlikely. The Chinese government in 2020 added content
recommendation algorithms to its export-control list, requiring a divestiture
or sale of TikTok's algorithm to go through its administrative licensing
procedures.
The source code for TikTok’s recommendation engine was
originally developed by ByteDance engineers in China, and customized for
operations in TikTok’s various global markets, including the U.S., according to
a legal filing.
ByteDance has attributed TikTok’s popularity to the
effectiveness of its recommendation engine, which bases each user’s content
feeds on how they interact with the content they watch.
'OPEN SOURCE'
The complexity of the task that the sources described to
Reuters as tedious “dirty work” underscores the difficulty of splitting the
underlying code that binds TikTok’s U.S. operations to its Chinese parent. The
work is expected to take over a year to complete, these sources said.
TikTok and ByteDance have vowed to battle the U.S. law in
court on First Amendment grounds. Nevertheless, engineers continue to operate
under orders to disentangle TikTok’s U.S. recommendation engine from
ByteDance’s broader network, the sources said.
An earlier plan to silo off U.S. user data, called Project
Texas, failed to appease U.S. regulators and lawmakers. Now the company is
seeking to escalate its efforts to show its U.S. operations are independent of
its Chinese owner.
At one point, TikTok executives considered open sourcing
some of TikTok's algorithm, or making it available to others to access and
modify, to demonstrate technological transparency, the sources said.
Executives have communicated plans and provided updates on
the code-splitting project during a team all-hands, in internal planning
documents and on its internal communications system, called Lark, according to
one of the sources who attended the meeting and another source who has viewed
the messages.
Reuters could not independently verify internal messages.
Compliance and legal issues involved with determining what
parts of the code can be carried over to TikTok are complicating the work,
according to one source. Each line of code has to be reviewed to determine if
it can go into the separate code base, the sources added.
The goal is to create a new source code repository for a
recommendation algorithm serving only TikTok U.S. Once completed, TikTok U.S.
will run and maintain its recommendation algorithm independent of TikTok apps
in other regions and its Chinese version Douyin. That move would cut it off
from the massive engineering development power of its parent company in
Beijing, the sources said.
If TikTok completes the work to split the recommendation
engine from its Chinese counterpart, TikTok management is aware of the risk
that TikTok U.S. may not be able to deliver the same level of performance as
the existing TikTok because it is heavily reliant on ByteDance’s engineers in
China to update and maintain the code base to maximize user engagement, sources
added. Reuters