ByteDance Inc, known for the popular Tik Tok app, has been forced to temporarily suspend its newest app that allowed working from home, due to an order from the Chinese internet regulatory body.
The coronavirus crisis has led companies to turn to digital apps to continue working even during the quarantine.
ByteDance Inc, Tik Tok creators, have wanted to take advantage of this to expand into the global market, but the Beijing government has thwarted their plans.
According to information provided to Bloomberg, the Cyberspace Administration of China forced ByteDance Inc to remove the Feishu business app from the different App stores.
Feishu is similar to the Western app, Slack, combined with Skype and Google Docs.
Sources indicated that the application was offering content from sites that are banned in China, such as Twitter and Facebook. This could be found in a news tab within Feishu’s Workstation.
The collaboration between the two companies joins the list of applications that ByteDance has tried to commercialize to become a more global services app, but that the Chinese government has banned in a matter of days because they consider it to have content that is dangerous for society.
In 2018, ByteDance was forced to shut down a jokes app called “Neihan Duanzi” as some regulators had complained about offensive and inappropriate content.
The developers intended to be able to compete against similar applications that dominate the Chinese market, but censorship has made this a titanic task.
To succeed in China it is necessary to comply with everything that the regulators indicate. That is why this week the Feishu Lite application has been launched, which completely removes the Workstation.
Although at one point the developers removed the news tab, the existence of Workstation still represented a problem for the regulatory body, so they decided to remove it entirely.
It should be noted that this function not only contained the news tab but also allowed to manage other business actions such as employee calendars or salary payments.
