the CEO of a company run in part by the CCP

That deserves some context

TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.

Although ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government.

TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies.

In November last year, the chair of ByteDance—the company’s co-founder Zhang Yiming—stepped down; a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China’s tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.

ByteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.

But the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP “is mistaken… a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok’s parent company.”