The list of would-be buyers for TikTok in the US – both rumoured and confirmed – has grown longer as the deadline for deciding its future looms. The social media giant faces being shut down in the US unless it sells to an American company by 5 April. The runners and riders range from US tech giants to the British entrepreneur dubbed “the king of homemade porn”. However, TikTok and its Chinese owner, ByteDance, have still not confirmed they are willing to do a deal. They also continue to reject the reason for the sale – that the US considers their ties to the Chinese government a national security threat. It is also not clear what exactly would be sold, in particular what would happen to TikTok’s algorithm, which decides what content to expose users to, and is considered a big reason for its success.
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