October 16, 2019 In a piece in our CEO Daily newsletter earlier this year, I marveled at the global success of TikTok, the video-sharing app created and controlled by Chinese startup Beijing ByteDance. In the months since, TikTok’s rise has gathered speed, especially in America where the app has been downloaded more than 80 million times.
From January 2018 through March of this year, TikTok was the most downloaded app on the Apple iTunes Store; in the quarter ending in June, it was eclipsed in number of downloads only by YouTube. That makes TikTok, launched in 2017, China’s most successful internet export by far.
If you’ve never heard of TikTok, that probably means you are not a teenager and don’t live with one. The gist, as Oprah Magazine explains, is that TikTok helps users to “shoot, edit, and share 15-second videos jazzed up with filters, music, animation, special effects, and more.”
Like other social media platforms, TikTok allows users to follow, like, and comment on content generated by others. A crucial difference, though, is that what you see on TikTok isn’t determined by your social network. Instead, the app uses artificial intelligence to intuit what sort of videos you’d like. As the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino puts it, “TikTok orders you dinner by watching you look at food.”
The New York Times last week invited five critics to share reflections after spending “48 Hours in the Strange and Beautiful World of TikTok.” They mostly turned thumbs up: TikTok, enthused one reviewer, is “a bottomless gumball machine, serving up ephemeral treats.”
So far, ByteDance, whose investors include Softbank and KKR, has proved remarkably adept at keeping that gumball machine from getting smashed up in the escalating U.S.-China trade war. Even as the Trump administration added dozens of Chinese tech companies to a national security blacklist, TikTok quietly continued to invade (or rather, get invited into) the bedrooms of millions of American teenagers.
Now TikTok, too, has come under scrutiny. Last week, Florida’s Republican senator Marc Rubio formally requested that the Treasury review ByteDance on national security grounds. He charges that Musical.ly, a China-based video sharing company acquired by Bytedance in 2017 and merged with TikTok, censored content on behalf of the Chinese government.
In a statement, TikTok said the Chinese government doesn’t request censorship of its content and, in any case, wouldn’t have jurisdiction because the company doesn’t operate in China. TikTok says it stores all U.S. user data in the United States, and that its content is reviewed by a U.S.-based team that adheres to U.S. laws and is “not influenced by any foreign government.”
At the very least, though, Rubio’s challenge underscores that way U.S. politicians can make life difficult for Chinese tech companies operating in America. In the meantime, Chinese officials are punishing the National Basketball Association for Daryl Morey’s tweet about Hong Kong.
Clay Chandler
On Twitter: @claychandler
Email: clay.chandler@fortune.com
This edition of Data Sheet was curated by Aaron Pressman.
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