What I also find interesting is that ByteDance is the only Chinese company to become "popular" in the West for a long time (Alibaba, Baidu, Tencent are all years old now), and I wonder how this moves affects them at home.

Stateside, I'm discouraged to see it's VC firms making bids (according to the article), as then it may become a play on how to flip this to Facebook as they are the only ones actually monetizing social media.