The Tiktok headquarters in Los Angeles, California. picture alliance/Ringo Chiu/ZUMA Press
There is currently discussion in US politics about a ban on the social network Tiktok operated by the Chinese company.
Current research by the “New York Times” shows: The traces of the origins of Bytedance – the company that runs Tiktok – also lead to the USA.
Documents from a court case reveal: The US company Susquehanna International Group, owned by major Republican donor Jeff Yass, actively supported Bytedance with a lot of money.
Approximately 1.5 billion people in the world use it Tiktok. The Chinese social media app is so successful – so influential – that both Democrats and Republicans in the US are discussing banning it over concerns about Chinese espionage.
Tiktok might not even exist without major investments from the USA. Because, This is what the New York Times reports, citing court documents seen by the newspaper: Bytedance, the company behind Tiktok, was actively supported during its creation and with a lot of money by the Susquehanna International Group of the US entrepreneur Jeff Yass.
It was known that Yass, known for his large donations to Donald Trump’s Republicans, holds 15 percent of the shares in Bytedance through Susquehanna. However, it has not yet been made public how centrally involved Susquehanna was in the creation of Bytedance – and ultimately Tiktok.
According to the New York Times, accidentally released court documents from a former contractor case against Susquehanna show that the company was not just a passive investor in Bytedance. The trail of emails, chat messages and memos leads to the year 2009 and to a Chinese real estate startup, 99Fang.
Funny Pictures, Pretty Babes – and finally Bytedance
The company no longer exists, but at the time it used an advanced search algorithm for real estate brokerage. According to the New York Times, Susquehanna was invested in 99 Fang – what’s more, according to documents available to the newspaper, the idea for the company came from Susquehanna employees. Even the CEO of 99Fang was chosen by Susquehanna people working in China.
The name of the CEO: Zhang Yiming. Zhang Yiming, who founded Bytedance in 2012. And who, according to the New York Times, wrote in an email in 2012: “Our search, our image processors, our suggestions, etc., are very strong. But in real estate this is limited.”
At that time, Zhang began to outline plans for shallow content that 99Fang’s algorithms could offer. He built test sites, Funny Pictures and Pretty Babes. He described these tests as 99Fang’s “brother company”. These tests, this brother company, the “NYT” quotes from an email from a Susquehanna director in China, were “the birth of Bytedance”.
And with that, in 2016, from Tiktok.