In an executive order issued on August 6, U.S. President Donald Trump gave the hugely popular short video-sharing social media app TikTok, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, 45 days to find a buyer. If TikTok didn’t sever its China connection in this time, it would be banned in the U.S.
The order on TikTok pointed to the app’s links to the Communist Party of China, saying all data collected by it “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information” and “may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit” the party. It also specifically mentioned India’s June 29 ban on TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps, which the Indian government decided “pose [a] threat to [the] sovereignty and integrity of India”, citing “compilation of…data, its mining and profiling by elements hostile to national security and defence of India.”
The moves in India and the U.S. — TikTok’s two biggest markets, with more than 400 million downloads in India and 175 million downloads in the U.S. — have brought the remarkable global rise of an unlikely social media phenomenon to a screeching halt.
TikTok is the brainchild of Zhang Yiming, a 37-year-old Chinese entrepreneur who founded ByteDance in 2012. His first big success was Jinri Toutiao, an AI-powered news aggregator app that is widely popular in China. In 2016, he founded a short video-sharing platform called Douyin, which became a rage among young Chinese who would post videos not longer than 15 seconds, showing everything from their singing talents to life in rural China. Thus was born TikTok.
Not in China
Rather than take Douyin to the world, Mr. Zhang launched a separate app called TikTok the following year, when he also acquired Musical.ly, a Shanghai-based video app that had become popular in the U.S. This was merged into TikTok, thereby giving it a ready-made market when it launched. While Douyin would not be made available outside China, TikTok similarly would only be rolled out for the rest of the world — contrary to the popular perception, TikTok is not used in China. This was a workaround that, Mr. Zhang hoped, would help the app avoid the scrutiny that Chinese companies that operate under suffocating censorship restrictions at home, known popularly as “the Great Firewall of China”, faced abroad.
That approach seemed to work. By 2018, TikTok ranked fourth in the world as the top non-game app behind Facebook, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, according to Harvard Business Review . It garnered a huge market in India, becoming the most downloaded app. A 2019 study showed children aged 4 to 15 in the U.S., the U.K and Spain spent 80 minutes a day on TikTok, second only to the 85 minutes spent on YouTube, according to Techcrunch.
Yet in a strange irony, the empowerment and freedom that many young users found in a Chinese app proved to be discomfiting for the countries where it was unleashed, both for social and political reasons. In 2018, the app was banned briefly in Indonesia for “negative” content seen to be “pornographic and blasphemous”. The ban was revoked after content was removed. In July this year, Pakistan threatened to ban the app for “immoral, obscene and vulgar content”. If social concerns can be addressed, it’s politics that poses the biggest test for the app. In India, the ban followed the June 15 clash on the border, while in the U.S., it was the latest move by the Trump administration amid a trade and technology war with China.
Concerns raised
Both India and the U.S. have expressed concerns on data security, and the fact that all Chinese companies, private or public, ultimately answer to the Communist Party. Japan has said it is also considering action against TikTok, while Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in August the government would “keep watching them” but “there’s no evidence to suggest to us today that that [a ban] is necessary”.
That India and the U.S. sought to ban the app outright, rather than seek to more tightly regulate it, for instance by insisting on local storage of data, suggest the moves are not just about privacy or security, but about broader ideological concerns about doing business with Chinese companies.
The demands of Chinese censorship were made clear in 2018, when Mr. Zhang himself was forced to issue a grovelling public apology after the Chinese government banned ByteDance’s app Neihan Duanzi, which was popular for sharing edgy jokes and memes. He pledged all his companies would “strengthen the work of Party construction, carrying out education among our entire staff on the four consciousnesses, socialist core values, guidance of public opinion, and laws and regulations, truly acting on the company’s social responsibility.”
Indeed, the rise of TikTok has triggered a debate about how - and whether - open societies can engage with Chinese firms that operate, back home, under their own laws, and without the checks and balances and transparency that applies elsewhere. The larger question countries face as they respond to the China model is, whether they may ironically end up internalising elements of the very model that they claim to be reacting against, as they move to erect their own firewalls.
