Written by Crystal Ho and Sheila Dang
(Reuters) – TikTok is working to clone its recommendation algorithm for its 170 million American users, which could lead to a version that operates independently of its Chinese parent company and is more palatable to U.S. lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources familiar with the matter. Direct knowledge of efforts.
Work on a source code split requested by TikTok's Chinese parent ByteDance late last year preceded a bill to force the sale of TikTok's U.S. operations that began gaining traction in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April.
The sources, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the short video sharing app, said that once the code is forked, it could pave the way for a divestment of US assets, although there is no current information about that app. Planning to do so.
The company previously said it had no plans to sell US assets and that such a move would be impossible.
TikTok initially declined to comment. After publishing this story, TikTok said in a post on the X website, “The Reuters story published today is misleading and factually inaccurate,” without specifying what is inaccurate.
TikTok also posted a clip from the federal lawsuit: “The 'qualified divestiture' required by law to allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States is simply not possible: not commercially, not technically, and not legally. And certainly not on the 270-degree timeline required by the law.” “
TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance filed a lawsuit in a US federal court in May, seeking to block the law requiring the sale of the app or ban it by January 19. On Tuesday, a US appeals court set an expedited schedule to consider legal appeals. For the new law.
Millions of lines of code
In the past few months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers in both the US and China have been ordered to begin tearing apart millions of lines of code, sifting through the company's algorithm that connects users to videos of their choice. Two sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters that the engineers' mission is to create a separate code base independent of the systems used by ByteDance's Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, while removing any information linked to Chinese users.
The previously unreported plan provides a rare look at what a technical separation of TikTok's U.S. operations could look like, and shows how far TikTok will go to address the partisan political risks it faces. US President Biden and other supporters of the law say TikTok gives Beijing too much access to large amounts of data, information that could be used to spy on or influence TikTok users in the United States.
Reuters previously reported that selling the app using algorithms is highly unlikely. In 2020, the Chinese government added content recommendation algorithms to its export control list, requiring the TikTok algorithm to be divested or sold in order to pursue administrative licensing procedures.
The source code for TikTok's recommendation engine was originally developed by ByteDance engineers in China, and has been customized for operations in TikTok's various global markets, including the United States, 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, which sources described to Reuters as arduous “dirty work,” underscores the difficulty of slicing down the underlying code linking TikTok's U.S. operations to its Chinese parent company. These sources said that it is expected to take more than a year to complete the work.
TikTok and ByteDance have vowed to fight the US law in court on First Amendment grounds. However, engineers continue to work under orders to separate TikTok's US recommendation engine from the broader ByteDance network, the sources said.
A previous plan to isolate US user data, called Project Texas, failed to appease US regulators and lawmakers. The company is now seeking to step up its efforts to show that its US operations are independent of its Chinese owner.
At one point, TikTok executives considered open sourcing some of TikTok's algorithms, or making them available for others to access and modify, to demonstrate technological transparency, the sources said.
Executives communicated the plans and provided updates on the code-splitting project throughout the entire team, in internal planning documents and on its internal communications system, called Lark, according to one source who attended the meeting and another source who witnessed it. the message.
Reuters was unable to independently verify the internal messages.
According to one source, compliance and legal issues related to determining which parts of the code can be ported to TikTok complicate the work. The sources added that each line of code must be reviewed to determine whether it can be entered into a separate code base.
The goal is to create a new source code repository for the recommendation algorithm that only serves TikTok US. Once completed, TikTok US will operate and maintain its recommendation algorithm independently from TikTok apps in other regions and its Chinese version Douyin. The sources said the move would cut it off from the massive engineering development power of its parent company in Beijing.
If TikTok completes the work on separating its recommendation engine from its Chinese counterpart, TikTok management recognizes the risk that TikTok US may not be able to deliver the same level of performance as the current TikTok because it relies heavily on ByteDance engineers in China. Added resources to update and maintain the code base to maximize user engagement.
