Tiktok is developing a clone of its recommendations algorithm for 170 million users in the United States. This step can lead to the creation of a version that will work regardless of the Chinese maternal company ByTedance and satisfy American legislators striving to prohibit the application.
Work on the separation of the source code began last year on the initiative of ByTedance, long before the bill on the forced sale of American operations Tiktok began to gain momentum in Congress.
The bill signed by President Bayden in April 2024 requires BYTEDANCE to sell American assets within 270 days or stop working in the United States. The initiative is aimed at eliminating the risks of national security related to the access of the Chinese authorities to the data of American users. If ByTedance does not fulfill the sales conditions, Tiktok will be blocked in the United States. The law also includes provisions on the support of government efforts to combat cyberspion and data protection.
Sources who wished to remain anonymous, reported that the successful separation of code could lay the basis for allocating American assets into a separate company, although there are no officials for sale yet. Tiktok previously stated that sale is impossible from the commercial, or from the technological, or from a legal point of view.
In recent months, hundreds of BYTEDANCE and Tiktok engineers in the USA and China have been working on a detachment of millions of lines of code, creating an independent database for American users. This project shows how far the company is to go to reduce political risks in the USA.
ByTedance attributes the popularity of Tiktok the effectiveness of its advisory algorithm, which forms the content of content based on user preferences. The technical separation of code is described as a laborious and complex work, requiring more than a year to complete.
Tiktok and ByTedance intend to challenge the new law in court, referring to the first correction of the US Constitution, but at the same time, the work on the separation of the code continues.
Earlier, Tiktok tried to reassure the regulators using the Texas project, which involved isolation of American users on US servers under the control of American employees. However, this idea did not satisfy the regulators due to insufficient transparency and the impossibility of complete data separation. Now Tiktok is considering the possibility of opening part of the source code for third -party developers to ensure technological transparency and prove the independence of their operations in the