How Chinese video app TikTok conquered the world, making teens, and child safety, trend
- With more than a billion downloads, the short-form video app owned by start-up ByteDance has captured the imagination of users across the globe.
- So what makes TikTok tick?
Most nights, from around seven till midnight, Sydney Jade is on TikTok, the smartphone app of the moment. The platinum blond teenager films herself singing show tunes, doing jumping jacks and joking around with store clerks at a Walmart not far from her home in Oklahoma, in the United States. Her short music videos and live streams are popular – Jade has 284,000 followers, some of whom periodically send her virtual gifts, such as 99 US cent (HK$7.80) puking-rainbow stickers.
Jade’s parents resisted TikTok at first. They hadn’t heard of the app and, Jade says, “didn’t like the idea of strangers watching me sing alone in front of the pink curtains in my bedroom”. But she convinced them that TikTok was “friendlier for kids than other apps like Facebook”. They let her join last year, just as, it seems, every other teenager signed on as well. In January, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the Android and iPhone stores, according to research firm Sensor Tower.
The story sounds a lot like the rise of other social-media powers such as Instagram and Snapchat, both of which pitched themselves as alternatives to Facebook’s big blue app. But TikTok wasn’t created by Stanford University students that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg could buy off or spend into the ground. It is a subsidiary of a Beijing start-up, ByteDance, which has built a collection of apps in China powered by vast troves of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Last year, ByteDance’s investors valued the company at US$75 billion, the most of any start-up in the world.
Inevitably, especially in the age of Donald Trump, TikTok’s fast growth and Chinese ownership have made it the subject of scrutiny in the US. In March, a government body – the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) – ordered gaming company Beijing Kunlun Tech, which bought gay-dating app Grindr, to sell the business over concerns that Chinese intelligence agencies could potentially use data from the app to blackmail users. In an April 1 filing, the Chinese company said it was in talks with CFIUS. US authorities haven’t said they are investigating ByteDance in connection with its ownership, but the large user base could conceivably make it a target.
“Social-media platforms are increasingly considered sensitive by CFIUS,” says Farhad Jalinous, head of national security and CFIUS practice at Washington-based law firm White & Case.
ByteDance says it now stores all TikTok data outside China and that the Chinese government has no access. (The company’s privacy policy had previously warned users it could share their information with its Chinese businesses, as well as law enforcement agencies and public authorities, if legally required to do so.)
