22/09/2025

BIZ & FINANCE MONDAY | SEPT 22, 2025

17

Americans to dominate board of TikTok’s US ops

China regulator warns Kuaishou, Weibo over content violations BEIJING: China’s top internet regulator issued warnings and imposed disciplinary measures against live-streaming platform Kuaishou and social media platform Weibo on Saturday, citing failures in content management. The Cyberspace Administration of China said in two separate statements the actions to be taken include summoning company representatives, issuing official warnings and ordering rectifications within a specified time frame. According to the CAC, both platforms failed to fulfill their core responsibility of content management, citing the frequent appearance of problematic entries on their main trending lists, particularly those hyping celebrity gossip and trivial personal updates. In a statement, Weibo said it “takes the matter very seriously” and “sincerely accepts the criticism and disciplinary decisions” from the authorities. “A special task force was immediately established to carry out rectification work, aiming to address governance issues around the trending list with the highest standards and strictest requirements, and to fully assume responsibility for content management,” the company said. Kuaishou did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The CAC’s announcement came a day after China’s market watchdog launched an investigation into Kuaishou’s e-commerce unit Kuaigou for suspected violations of the nation’s e-commerce law. – Reuters targeting digital space HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s Adrian Cheng, scion of one of the city’s richest families and who stepped down a year ago as CEO of major developer New World Development , launched a new firm yesterday focusing on the digital space and emerging markets. ALMAD Group will target digital assets and “transformative industries” across entertainment, sports, media, healthcare, commercial management and cultural tourism in markets including mainland China, Asean countries and the Middle East, according to Cheng’s announcement of the launch. ALMAD Group also plans to globalise Cheng’s cultural brand “K11 by AC”, with its Anime IP business already expanding in mainland China and the Middle East. “Our mission is clear: to build what the next generation needs and to shape a future economy filled with possibilities,” said Cheng, founder and executive chairman of ALMAD. The Harvard graduate has previously provided early-stage funding to startups including Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, EV maker XPeng and microfinance platform Micro Connect. The 45-year-old resigned from family company New World last September. – Reuters and would make the results of its investigation into the incident public. The incident comes less than a year after Optus, owned by Singapore Telecommunications, was fined A$12 million (RM33 million) by regulators for failing to provide emergency call services to thousands during a nationwide outage in 2023. Optus also suffered a cyberattack in 2022 that affected the data of 9.5 million Australians. Former CEO Kelly Bayer Rosmarin resigned in the wake of the earlier incidents, and Rue took over in November 2024. – Reuters New World scion launches firm

American users will be stored on US cloud computing infrastructure run by US software firm Oracle . The official also said the TikTok algorithm “will be secured, retrained and operated in the United States outside of ByteDance’s control”. “TikTok’s content-recommendation algorithm will be retrained from the ground up – reviewed and analysed under US supervision with US data that will not be shared outside of the United States,” the official said. This is an important point because US officials had warned in recent years that the algorithm could be used by China to manipulate what Americans see on social media. Reuters and others reported this week that the algorithm could be licensed from ByteDance. The official said US users would still be able to use TikTok to interact with content from around the world. TikTok’s US assets would be majority-owned by American investors and operated in the United States by a board of directors with national security and cybersecurity credentials, the official added. ByteDance’s current shareholders include Susquehanna International Group, General Atlantic, and KKR. ByteDance would hold less than 20% of the stock of a joint venture controlling TikTok’s US operations, the official said. – Reuters

would meet face-to-face in six weeks. But Beijing’s statements have not clarified how advanced the progress has been. Details of the agreement, as laid out by the senior White House official, largely align with reporting from Reuters and other news outlets in recent days. The official said Trump would extend the latest pause in enforcement of the 2024 law for an additional 120 days, suggesting the next deadline for an agreement to be finalised would be in April. TikTok, China’s Ministry of Commerce, and the Cyberspace Administration of China did not respond to requests for comment. Still, lawmakers will want an explanation about how the deal will work. “The devil will be in the details,” said Representative Frank Pallone, a Democrat. “We cannot allow China continued access to massive amounts of Americans’ personal data, and we cannot allow Trump to hand TikTok over to his tech bro buddies and turn it into a MAGA mouthpiece. Period.” It is not clear if the deal in its current state will qualify as a full divestiture as required by Congress under the 2024 law. Trump has credited TikTok with helping him win re-election last year and has 15 million followers on his personal account. The White House also launched an official TikTok account last month. The agreement described by the official, as expected, will require that all data on

WASHINGTON: A US-China agreement on TikTok’s United States operations includes ByteDance choosing one of seven board members for the new entity, with Americans holding the six other seats, a senior White House official said on Saturday. President Donald Trump is trying to keep the short video app with 170 million US users from being banned after Congress passed a law in 2024 that ordered it shut down by January 2025 if its American assets were not sold by owner ByteDance. Trump has delayed enforcement of the law through mid-December amid efforts to extract TikTok’s US assets from the global platform, line up American investors and ensure the new ownership qualifies as a full divestiture needed under the 2024 law. Last week’s progress toward a deal marked a rare breakthrough in months-long talks between the world’s two biggest economies that have sought to defuse a wide-ranging trade war that has unnerved global markets. Trump said on Friday that he and Chinese President Xi Jinping had made progress on a TikTok agreement in a phone call and o Algorithm will be outside ByteDance’s control, US official says

View of an Optus shop in Sydney. – REUTERSPIC

Optus blames departure from ‘established processes’ for outage SYDNEY: Optus, Australia’s No. 2 telecom carrier, said yesterday that a departure from regular processes on a network upgrade sparked a technical failure that disrupted emergency call services for 13 hours and has been linked to four deaths. investigate the company’s “unacceptable” failure, and Optus said the next day it would cooperate with any effort to look into the incident. to report the outage but their concerns were not escalated, he said. “That is clearly not good enough ... I want to reiterate how sorry I am about the very sad loss of the lives of four people, who could not reach emergency services in their time of need,” he said.

In a statement yesterday, Optus chief executive Stephen Rue said the company’s own initial investigation has shown that established processes were not followed on the upgrade. “As to the full technical detail of the network failure, we will need to leave that for the investigation,” Rue said. Five customers contacted Optus’ call centre

There has been growing outcry in Australia over the glitch, which Optus said occurred during a network firewall upgrade from 12.30am on Thursday (10.30pm on Wednesday in Malaysia) until about 1.30p.m. and potentially impacted 600 customers. The government on Friday said it would

Two of the dead were identified as an eight-week-old boy and a 68-year-old woman, South Australia police said. The other two fatalities were men aged 74 and 49, police in Western Australia said. Rue said on Friday Optus had fixed the fault