The rise of TikTok has been incredible. This Chinese video-sharing social networking app was launched in September 2016 as “Douyin” and became available worldwide as TikTok after merging with Musical.ly in August 2018. In 2019 TikTok was the second most downloaded app when looking at combined downloads from Apple App Store and Google Play. Currently it has already over 800m monthly active users (MAUs) in 154 countries.
TikTok is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos – and people really seem to love it and get hooked. This is confirmed by engagement data: TikTok has the highest social media engagement rates per post (compared to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) and users spend an average of 52 minutes per day on the app.
Why is TikTok so popular? The short answer is that a lot of the content (i.e. the videos) delivered by the app (i.e. its machine learning algorithms) is very entertaining and addictive. For a more comprehensive analysis, check out Ben Thompson’s recent article The TikTok War, but this is how he summarizes it:
1) Humans prefer video to photos to text.
2) TikTok makes it easy to create videos, ensuring a massive supply of content (even if most of the supply is low quality).
3) TikTok relies on the algorithm to surface compelling content, and is not constrained by your social network
Like all social media apps, TikTok collects a lot of data about its users. The fact that the controlling entity behind TikTok (ByteDance) is a Chinese tech corporation has raised concerns about privacy and security. As Thompson points out, “all Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders”.
Earlier this week Amazon (with 840k employees) did a strange manoeuvre by first banning TikTok internally and shortly afterwards unbanning it. In the ban email sent to all employees, Amazon said they had to remove the app from any phones with access to Amazon email “for security reasons”. In the unban email they said that all of this was a mistake.
And then there’s global politics and all the power struggles, where tech and software have become increasingly important pieces on the chess board.
As a result of the conflicts between China and India in the disputed Himalayan border area, India decided to ban TikTok entirely within its borders. That’s a pretty big deal, as the app had 119m MAUs in India. Shortly after India’s decision, The US Secretary of State said he's considering banning TikTok (and some other Chinese social apps too) for reasons that can only be seen as an extension of the ongoing trade war between China and the US.
After all, TikTok can hardly be seen as the main attack vector for stealing US government or corporate secrets. In fact, it’s hard to see how TikTok could be a major cybersecurity problem, as (like all mobile apps) it needs to go through a rigorous review process before being accepted into the App Store. I would also bet that Apple and Google are looking at big apps like TikTok extra carefully before allowing them massive distribution through their stores. Additionally, at least in iOS all apps are running in fully sandboxed environments.
Here it’s good to remind ourselves that China itself has already for years blocked access to most of the popular American social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Today, the Great Chinese Firewall is even capable of blocking most VPN access attempts to these services.
Finally, we have the ongoing US presidential election campaigns, where President Trump is facing a tough situation, which has become dramatically worse due to COVID-19, and it’s very likely that he will blame China and anything China related for almost everything.
The Tulsa incident, where TikTok teens apparently sank a Trump rally, didn’t exactly improve TikTok’s odds of survival in the US. And in general, many feel uncomfortable that one of the most popular apps among American teens didn’t originate from Silicon Valley, but instead came from Beijing.
Given everything that’s going on between China and the US and the fact that we have an incumbent president who’s becoming increasingly desperate and angry, it’s a safe bet that TikTok’s 26.5m MAUs in the US can soon say goodbye to their favorite social media app.