For anyone who has shared passions, such as dance moves, sea flats, knitting patterns or Excel sheets, TikTok is the place to be. The Chinese-owned short-form video app has emerged as an accessible and playful global platform for 1 billion users to indulge their obsessions, find an audience of like-minded followers and sometimes even make money .
For those of a more conspiratorial mindset, however, the entertainment platform is an electronic Manchurian candidate, creating the opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party to manipulate public opinion, subvert democracies and peer into teenage bedrooms. In June 2020, India banned TikTok after a border clash with China, cutting off 200 million local users from the service. The following month, then-US President Donald Trump also threatened to ban TikTok over national security concerns — but lost the election before he could implement the plan. This month, the UK parliament shut down its TikTok account over fears of a data leak. “The prospect of Xi Jinping’s government having access to personal data on our children’s phones should be a cause for great concern,” the MPs warned.
While arguments rage over whether TikTok is either too irrelevant or too threatening, there is no doubt that it has become a huge cultural and business phenomenon in more than 150 countries. The latest report from the Pew Research Center found that TikTok had grown in popularity among American teenagers. About 67 percent of respondents said they used TikTok compared to just 32 percent for the once-dominant Facebook. “TikTok is not alone in the zeitgeist. It’s the zeitgeist,” wrote Jessica Lessin, founder of the tech site Information.
Becoming the coolest app for young users, TikTok has left the West Coast’s best and fastest app in the dust. Before the platform appeared, Twitter had failed to capitalize on Vine, its short videos. Facebook, Instagram and Snap have also staked claim to the digital territory that TikTok has now taken. According to Cloudflare’s global traffic report, last year TikTok.com overtook Google.com to become the most popular domain on the Internet. In Silicon Valley parlance, TikTok has surpassed the blitzscalers’ rapid-scaling ladders.
There are probably two reasons for this great popularity. First, the platform is extremely easy to use and very addictive to look at. With its tools and filters, the TikTok app allows users to make short videos, ranging from 15 seconds to 10 minutes, and helps them monetize their content by driving ads their way. Even a former FT business contractor who bears an uncanny resemblance to actor Benedict Cumberbatch has gained 4.5 million TikTok followers playing Dr Strange (@cumbermatch).
Second, TikTok promotes videos through a content graph rather than a social graph, as is commonly used by other platforms. In other words, AI-trained algorithms promote content to those on the platform with similar interests rather than being distributed primarily through networks of followers. In theory, at least, the app allows more “nobodies” to become “someones.”
That said, TikTok increasingly suffers from some of the same pathologies as American platforms. She has been accused of spreading disinformation harmful to democracy in Colombia, Kenya, France, the US and elsewhere, particularly during the war in Ukraine. TikTok says it deploys AI tools and employs “thousands” of moderators worldwide to enforce strict content guidelines, particularly in Ukraine.
The company has also shown flashes of an aggressive tech-brochure culture with a senior manager in London claiming he “didn’t believe” in maternity leave.
What about the potential influence of the Chinese government? TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, a private company last valued at $180 billion in December 2020, has surrounded its international operations by creating a separate corporate structure based in Singapore. TikTok says all of its international users’ data is held in the US and Singapore and — from 2023 — in Ireland. The company insists it will not leak personal data to the Chinese government, nor would it give Beijing access to such data even if requested.
In his well-researched book, TikTok Boom, Chris Stokel-Walker investigated these claims. He found no evidence of systematic leakage of personal data. But engineers in China had access to some data to test algorithms or spot bot attacks, for example. “TikTok is not a social media sleeper waiting to be remotely activated on the phones of millions of Westerners,” he concluded. “The reality here is that there is no big scam, but rather a little white lie.”
Even if this conclusion is correct, it may not help. Some US senators are still attacking TikTok as an instrument of Chinese soft power. There is a risk that the company could yet suffer the same fate as Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment maker blacklisted by the US.
But if TikTok can avoid becoming a geopolitical punchline, it could symbolize a moment in the evolution of cyberspace: the Sinicization of the global Internet, as technology analyst Ben Thompson calls it. In this digital world, more centralized Chinese-style content control via recommendation algorithms becomes a feature, not a bug. For several decades, the US has dominated the norms, values and practices of the consumer internet. The rise of TikTok points to a more contested future.
