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【Li Liang refutes the “ByteDance time” claim; Qin Shuo calls it a very realistic fact】October 27 Later, Li Liang, vice president of Douyin Group, responded on Weibo to the claim of “ByteDance time in China’s internet industry” raised by media professional and financial observer Qin Shuo, saying that this characterization was “extremely imprecise and pure nonsense.” Li Liang said that no company could become “China’s internet xx time”; the landscape of instant messaging was relatively stable due to the moat created by social graphs, while short dramas and short videos were highly competitive sectors with rapidly changing competitive dynamics. He also said that Tencent’s short dramas and short videos were growing much faster than Douyin and RedNote, while instant messaging, gaming, e-commerce, and music also occupied a large amount of users’ time. He subsequently posted that Qin Shuo’s analysis contained several basic common-sense errors. 26 On day, Qin Shuo published a post on the official account “Qin Shuo’s Circle of Friends,” citing QuestMobile data from a Nomura Securities report, saying that 2026 year July China’s mobile internet usage time ranked in the top 50 APP apps, with Douyin surpassing WeChat for the first time, accounting for 19.4%, while WeChat accounted for 18.8%; the ByteDance ecosystem’s APP share of usage time was 40.9%, compared with 29.1%for the Tencent ecosystem. He asked whether, despite WeChat’s daily active users still outnumbering Douyin’s, China’s internet industry was shifting from Tencent time to ByteDance time, and from WeChat time to “Douyin + RedNote time.” This morning, Qin Shuo posted in his WeChat Moments that 2026 year August ByteDance ecosystem accounted for 41.8%, while the Tencent ecosystem accounted for 28.6%, a difference of 13.2 percentage points. He said that “ByteDance time” was a summary indicating that the ByteDance ecosystem’s total share of usage time exceeded 40%, and was “a very realistic fact,” while emphasizing that users’ share of time was not equivalent to their share of user value. On the same day, RedNote Short Dramas, a short-drama platform owned by ByteDance, issued a statement saying that online claims such as “annualized revenue approaching 40000000000 yuan” and “this year’s revenue reaching 42000000000 to 45000000000 yuan” were untrue, and that the related comparisons, estimates, and extended interpretations had no factual basis. It also said that most of its current revenue continued to be used for content creator revenue sharing, copyright guarantees, and support for high-quality content. Third-party data showed that, as of 2026 year July, RedNote Short Dramas had 168000000 daily active users, up 107%。October 19. Liu Xing, head of public relations at Doubao, responded to the claim that “more than half of the computing power in China is being used to produce feel-good dramas,” saying that the relevant data was unreliable. For ByteDance, only approximately 10%of the company’s total computing power was used for training and inference of video-generation models.