The founder of TikTok has defended a plan to sell the US arm of the viral video app, as his investors threw their support behind a bid for the business by Microsoft.
In a second letter to employees in as many days, Zhang Yiming, the chief executive of ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, said he had “no choice” but to submit to demands from US regulators and the White House to sell the app.
“As a company, we have to abide by local [US] laws, and have no choice,” Mr Zhang wrote. But the forced sale, he added, “was not their purpose — it’s even something they [the US government] didn’t want to see — the real purpose was to completely ban and even more”.