TikTok: Video Voodoo

WHEN TIKTOK FIRST arrived globally—sometime in 2018, after its parent company ByteDance merged it with another platform Musical.ly—it became something of an instant cultural phenomenon. It was a new type of social media, built entirely in the pursuit of fun. It had no news, no political discussions, no ads, no lengthy status updates. Just short fun and goofy videos that were meant to go viral. Globally, it has gone on to garner more than 800 million users.

Now just two years later, this social media behemoth is finding itself under scrutiny, and close to being expunged, for its closeness with the Chinese government in several parts of the world. After the recent ban in India, one of its most important markets, the US, is considering a similar move (a White House spokesperson has said the decision will be taken in a ‘few weeks’.) The US State and Defense departments already prohibit employees from downloading the app on government devices and there is now a bill to bar all federal employees from doing so; there are now also demands to look into its acquisition of Musical.ly. Several companies are also following suit. Amazon briefly asked its employees in the US to do so too. Similar scrutiny is now building in other countries in Europe, UK and Australia.

Although TikTok denies it shares data with the Chinese government, much of how it works, from how it stores its data to how its algorithm works, is shrouded in mystery. All social media companies collect users’ data, but one of the primary concerns, its critics say, is that ByteDance cannot refuse information requests from the Chinese government.

In the past, there have been several reports showing that TikTok instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention topics sensitive to the Chinese government, such as the Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, the religious group Falun Gong and internment camps in Xinjiang. Even when protests in Hong Kong began to trend on almost all social media platforms, if you looked it up on TikTok, at least during the height of the protests, it almost always drew a blank.

TikTok also tends to have strong cultural strictures. There are rules, it is reported, for instance in the US, over how much cleavage is to be permitted on the platform, over hip thrusting, shaking of the upper torso, the showing of cigarettes, tattoos and drugs. According to a Washington Post article, earlier this year, some of TikTok’s content moderators in the US carried on a silent rebellion and did not delete videos of women working out in sports bras and leggings despite some of the heavier women violating TikTok’s rule against showing more than two inches of cleavage.

TikTok has tried to respond to the increased scrutiny by distancing its roots in China stressing that it is not available in China—ByteDance offers a similar app called Douyin there. And that while it might have been born in China, it is now led by an American CEO (the former Disney head Kevin Mayer) with key employees from local countries. It points out that it stores data locally—in the case of the US, in Virginia with a backup in Singapore; in Ireland and UK, for European users. There are even reports that TikTok is considering shifting its headquarters out of China; according to The New York Times, it has even hired a small army of lobbyists, including one with close ties to President Donald Trump, to plead its case. As a show of its intentions, it became one of the first social media companies to pull its operations out of Hong Kong after the city imposed new national security laws that would force internet companies to hand over user data.

A big problem for TikTok is that as a social media company, it is travelling in unchartered territory. TikTok is the first true social media platform that has managed to break out of China and become a global cultural phenomenon. Even the other social media powerhouse, the Tencent Holdings–owned WeChat, is mostly limited to China or the diaspora abroad.

How does the platform navigate this new world it finds itself in, straddling the distinct cultural and political values of the country of its origin and those it wishes to become part of? All this while the world becomes much more cautious of China and its control over its businesses.

For TikTok, it is skating on thin ice.

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