| Like the memes it incubates and spreads, TikTok, the Chinese lip-synching app that boasts more than half a billion global users, has gone viral this past month—at least in the global business press. Fortune‘s Ellen McGirt was among the many observers to marvel that country trap artist Montero Hill (a.k.a. Lil Nas X) was able to use TikTok to create a huge following for his record-breaking crossover hit “Old Town Road.” CNBC notes that, in this year’s first quarter, TikTok was the third-most downloaded app in the U.S., just behind Facebook Messenger and a game called Color Bump 3D. The Boston Globe‘s Michael Andor Brodeur hails TikTok as “a promising solution to the gripes of many disaffected Facebook users, who loathe the daily slog through its endless stream of ads, articles, arguments, and aggrandizement.” Meanwhile National Public Radio last week aired a TikTok “explainer” enlisting help from a Rolling Stone editor who described the app as “a weird hodgepodge of every sort of viral thing that could happen in a short-form video app.” For many American parents of “tweens,” the popularity of TikTok will be old news. (Thankfully, my daughter, about to turn 16, disdains the app as “a bunch of lame 19 year-olds trying to make money off of 12 year-olds.”) But TikTok has made headlines for reasons other than its viral appeal. Last July, Indonesian authorities banned the app for fomenting “inappropriate conduct and blasphemy.” In February, U.S. regulators fined TikTok $5.7 million for illegally collecting the names, email addresses, pictures and locations of children under 13. In India, the app was banned for two weeks last month after a local court ruled the platform could expose children to sexual predators, pornographic content and cyberbullying. A recent analysis in the South China Morning Post faults TikTok’s parent company, Beijing ByteDance, for its failure to understand legal, political and cultural sensitivities in the markets in which it operates. Even so, the venture’s financial prospects haven’t suffered. ByteDance’s investors, which include SoftBank and KKR, have valued the company at more than $75 billion, making it the world’s most valuable start-up. The Telegraph’s Robin Pagnamenta argues TikTok and its parent company pose a far greater global security concern for Western economies than Chinese telecommunications equipment giant Huawei Technologies. ByteDance’s suite of apps, Pagnamenta warns, “are hoovering up oodles of data on hundreds of millions of foreigners – British, American, Brazilian and Indian – many of them children.” What happens to that data? How it will be regulated? The U.S. recently pressured Beijing Kunlun Tech, a Chinese gaming company, to sell its stake in Grindr, a popular gay dating app. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which vets foreign deals for national-security risks, expressed concern that personal data submitted by Grindr's users could be used by the Chinese government to blackmail American officials. Is TikTok any different? I’m thinking about all this because I’ve been re-reading Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism. In her telling of the rise of America’s tech industry, U.S. lawmakers and regulators seem mostly “captured” by well-funded, fast-growing U.S. tech companies. By contrast, in China, “private” tech companies like Beijing Bytedance serve at the pleasure of the ruling Communist Party. How should we integrate such firms into the rest of the global economy? More China news below. |
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