It's also the reason why TikTok is going to be hard to scale profitably in advanced economies. Chinese staff, especially for work like moderation, is a lot cheaper.
Worth nothing that TikTok operations globally is mainly supported by Bytedance staff in China. Very skeptical on how they can achieve splitting the company and launching an IPO without moving most of those jobs moving overseas.
If they split off some staff into their own Chinese company owned by TikTok Global based in the US, it doesn't change anything.
License from Bytedance to allow TikTok the use the codebase and code also won't fly in an IPO.
The only way this makes sense is that TikTok will never IPO, this is merely a delaying tactic until the election year closes.
No illegal content for a social media service from China is a pretty large negative point.
If they allowed illegal content, they'd have been banned even sooner. The best you can hope for is that they do not apply Chinese law outside of China, which seems to be the case, considering they have to make TikTok unavailable in China to avoid people seeing anything that's illegal in China.
The problem with "illegal" is that it is quickly extended to legally questionable. Defending content is not financially viable for any platform, even if you are in the right. In consequence it will be removed.
Twitter, Facebook and co currently attempt a regulatory capture and want to actually scrap their legal protections because they now have their censorship algorithm idiots demanded for some time.
Is this confirmed? That's a neat tidbit. Nice article!