alt Hacker News> Tiktok was forced to separate itself into a chinese version and the non-chinese version by the US because we didn't want "da ccp" controlling tiktok
No. TikTok was forced to put its data on American servers [1].
Douyin was launched in 2016 as musical.ly, and is unrelated to U.S. pressure. (EDIT: Douyin was launched in 2016, TikTok in 2017. Musical.ly was acquired in 2017 and merged into/basically became TikTok. TikTok has never been in China.)
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/tiktok-moves-us-user-data...
Musical.ly was not China only and I knew musical.ly before it was the predecessor of tiktok. From how I recall it, it had mostly American users. Was the split during the rebranding?