Tik Tok or Douyin as it is known as in China, has quickly become a social media staple surpassing American giants. The app with an oddly specific “for you” page catered to the viewer has reaped the benefits of covid19 lockdown boredom. Downloads increased rapidly in March as those restricting their movements downloaded the app out of sheer curiosity, to see what all the fuss has been about.
The app, owned by ByteDance, now has more than two billion downloads. The company’s mission is displayed clearly on its plain website- “Inspire creativity, enrich life.” Tik Tok’s previous form was Musical.ly, a lip-synching app targeted towards young people. ByteDance is reported to have bought the karaoke app for around one billion dollars.
The founder and CEO of ByteDance, Yiming Zhang, knows what modern day customers want (his own travel search engine was acquired by TripAdvisor). Time Magazine included Zhang in its list of the world’s one hundred most influential people.
The app’s future has been thrown into turmoil during the summer, as Trump signed an executive order to ban Tik Tok in the interest of protecting national security. “Tik Tok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users including internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories”, said the President in his order.
“This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information- potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage,” claimed Trump.
Former CEO Levin Mayer promised more transparency on TikTok’s algorithm as the company addressed the President’s concern by stating that all data is kept within the United States with a back-up in Singapore. When TikTok boss Alex Zhu was asked by The New York Times what he would if President Xi Jinping requested that he take a video down from the app, Zhu replied that he would “turn him down.”
In the meantime, popular accounts urged their followers to follow their other social media platforms fearing that their TikTok accounts would be deleted permanently. US Army and Navy members were forbidden from downloading TikTok on their government-issued devices.
President Trump has also addressed national security concerns over ‘WeChat’, a social media platform for exchanging messages. TikTok’s lawyers have filed a lawsuit against Trump’s government on the grounds that his executive order was unlawful according to the first amendment. One of these lawyers placed the utmost importance on the social side of TikTok, describing it as the “modern day version of a town square.”
On the 20th of September, Trump prohibits app stores in the US from distributing or maintaining TikTok. Meaning that TikTok users that already have the app are only affected in so far as they are prevented from profiting from new updates.
America is not alone in its TikTok ban. Its most popular market used to be in India before it was banned there over safety concerns. Australia also considered a ban on the video sharing platform. TikTok wrote to Australian politicians on the subject of the app being used as a “political football” and assuring them that Australian data was not being stored in China.
Microsoft and Walmart attempted to make an offer to ByteDance but they were unsuccessful. Now Oracle has declared that it wants a majority share in TikTok, something that the Chinese government described as extortion.
November 12th now stands as the deadline for the sale of TikTok to an American company. Whether or not a President of the Free World has the power to ban an app is something that will be figured out in the meantime.