By Krystal Hu and Sheila Dang
(Reuters) -TikTok is trying to clone a recommendation algorithm for its 170 million US users that could lead to a version that works independently of its Chinese parent and is preferred by American lawmakers who want to ban it, according to sources with direct knowledge of the effort.
Work to separate the source code ordered by TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance late last year preceded a bill to force the sale of TikTok’s US operations that began gaining steam in Congress this year. The bill was signed into law in April.
The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the short-form video-sharing app, said that if the code was split, it could be the basis for a divestment of US assets, although none are currently in place. plan to do so.
The company has previously said it has no plans to sell its US assets and that such a move is unlikely.
TikTok initially declined to comment. After publishing this story, TikTok in a post on X said “The Reuters story published today is misleading and factually inaccurate,” without specifying what the inaccuracy was.
TikTok also submitted part of the federal lawsuit: “the ‘quality divestiture’ demanded by the Act so that TikTok continues to operate in the United States is simply impossible: not commercial, not technological, not legal. And certainly not in the 270-timeline days required by the Act.”
TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance sued in US federal court in May, seeking to block a law forcing it to sell or ban the app until January 19. A US appeals court on Tuesday set a fast-track schedule to consider legal challenges. to the new law.
millions of lines of CODE
In recent months, hundreds of ByteDance and TikTok engineers in the U.S. and China have been ordered to begin dissecting millions of lines of code, refining the company’s algorithm that pairs users with the videos they want. The engineer’s mission is to create a separate codebase independent of the system used by ByteDance’s Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, while removing information related to Chinese users, two sources with direct knowledge of the project told Reuters.
The previously unreported plan offers a rare look at the technical separation of TikTok’s US operations, and shows how long TikTok will take to overcome the bipartisan political risks it faces. US President Biden and other supporters of the law have argued that TikTok gives Beijing too much access to reams of data, information that could be used to spy on or influence US TikTok users.
Reuters previously reported that algorithmically selling apps was impossible. The Chinese government in 2020 added the content recommendation algorithm to the export control list, which requires the divestiture or sale of the TikTok algorithm to pass the administrative licensing procedure.
The source code for TikTok’s recommendation engine was originally developed by ByteDance engineers in China, and was adapted to operate in TikTok’s various global markets, including the US, according to a legal filing.
ByteDance attributes TikTok’s popularity to the effectiveness of its recommendation engine, which bases each user’s content feed on how they interact with the content they watch.
‘OPEN SOURCE’
The complexity of the task, which the source described to Reuters as “dirty work” that looms large underlines the difficulty of severing the underlying code that ties TikTok’s US operations to its Chinese parent. The work will take more than a year, the source said.
TikTok and ByteDance have vowed to fight the US law in court on First Amendment grounds. However, engineers continue to operate orders to remove TikTok’s US recommendation engine from ByteDance’s wider network, the source said.
A previous plan to eliminate US user data, called Project Texas, failed to please US regulators and lawmakers. Now the company is stepping up efforts to show its US operations are not independent of their Chinese owners.
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 technology transparency, the source said.
Executives have communicated plans and provided updates on the code-splitting project throughout the team, in an internal planning document and an internal communications system, called Lark, according to one source who attended the meeting and another source who has seen it. messages.
Reuters could not independently verify internal messages.
Compliance and legal issues related to determining what parts of code can be brought to TikTok make it complicated, according to one of the sources. Each line of code must be reviewed to determine whether it can go into a separate codebase, the source added.
The goal is to create a new source code repository for the recommendation algorithm only for TikTok US. The move would take away a large engineering development force from the parent company in Beijing, the source said.
If TikTok completes the task of separating the recommendation engine from its Chinese partner, TikTok management is aware of the risk that TikTok US may not be able to provide the same performance as the existing TikTok because it is too dependent on ByteDance engineers in China. to update and maintain the code base to maximize user engagement, resources are added.
