TikTok appears to be gearing up for a big push into messaging

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

There are messaging features inside of TikTok, but nobody really thinks of TikTok as a messaging app. The company appears intent on changing that, though: its parent company ByteDance is hiring for a slew of roles on a team called TikTok Social," which seems to be tasked with turning TikTok into a much more powerful messaging system.

The listings, which were first spotted by Axios, are vague in the way that all job listings tend to be, but they make TikTok's ambitions clear. We are the messaging team on TikTok," a listing for an engineering lead says. Our team's mission is to facilitate meaningful user connections through TikTok's messaging experience, which is still in its infancy." Another listing, for a backend tech lead, says the...

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