TikTok Executives Fretted About China Ties of CapCut Editing-App

Last year, the second most downloaded free app in the U.S. on iPhones was CapCut, a video-editing app made by TikTok’s parent ByteDance and popular with TikTok users who use its templates and filters to create videos for the app. But CapCut—unlike TikTok itself—is directly run by ByteDance executives in China, a point confirmed by a management shake-up at ByteDance earlier this month.

Some inside ByteDance have worried over the past couple of years that running CapCut out of China could become a lightning rod of criticism for the company given the political scrutiny TikTok has faced in Washington over its ties to China. In internal meetings among TikTok and ByteDance managers in 2022 and 2023, some TikTok managers questioned why CapCut was run out of China when TikTok was not, said two people familiar with the situation.