Inside China, Bytedance's founder is known as pro-US. They've publicly made pro-US statements.

Furthermore, the CCP has 90+ million members. With the number of employees that Bytedance has in China, you'd expect — by proportion — that they have thousands of employees that are CCP members. But it's just a couple of hundred.

Bytedance's founder has made an effort to make this a global company, not a Chinese company, not a "CCP/state company". He believes in internationalism.

And yet here we are: Mike Pompeo calling him a "mouthpiece of the CCP", and many people on Hacker News believing that Tiktok is a big conspiracy to hack the United States. All without a fair investigation into who Bytedance is, how much of these fears are actually founded, or whether there are more productive solutions than kicking out all things Chinese.

The irony. Can you imagine what all this does to his pro-US stance, or what it does to all the pro-US people in China for that matter? Treating China as an enemy is a self-fulfilling prophecy.