A little less than two years ago, I listened to a series of podcast episodes released by Bloomberg called Foundering: The TikTok Story. It gave a wonderful deep dive into the creation story of what has become TikTok. The early days were fascinating to learn about, as the origin begins with Musical.ly when Alex Zhu observes a group of teenagers playing with their phones on a train in California; half were listening to music, and the other half were taking videos and selfies. At the time, Alex was building an education video platform, but from his experience on the train, he had an epiphany that “education was against human nature,” and that a combination of social media, music, and videos is what is most powerful and captivating, especially for teenagers. Zhu went on to aggressively build Musical.ly in 30 days, and it launched in July 2014. It was headquartered in Shanghai with an office in San Francisco. The app became popular with over 200 million users by May 2017 – I vividly remember my sister dragging my infant looking self to participate in a video where we’d lip-sync the intro of J-Kwon’s song “Tipsy” talking about underage drinking. Being amid the rise in popularity of other social media apps where any sense positive affirmation was the goal, my sister was enthralled with the likes and comments from friends on her latest Musical.ly post. This new (videos+music=fun) formula was taking form fast as Alex Zhu expected, and it is very clear to see the relationship between the vision, beginning, and present day result.
Musical.ly was acquired by ByteDance later in 2017 for $1 billion, and it eventually merged with and became TikTok in August of 2018. The fact that ByteDance is a relatively new Chinese internet technology company has been a prominent discussion recently due to the fact that, under Chinese law, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can force “ByteDance to turnover U.S. user data and manipulate content displayed on the app.” The other main company BytDance owns is Tuotiao, which specializes is China’s most popular news app that directs a news feed based on a powerful recommendation algorithm. Sound familiar? Now I am unsure of whether or not the Chinese law applied to Musical.ly (remember its headquarters were in Shanghai). What’s really crazy about TikTok is how many people use and love it. How much do they love it? To the point where the average teen spent 91 minutes per day on the app. If that’s the average, think about how high that range could be.
The scrutiny against TikTok isn’t necessarily new, as Trump announced in 2020 that they had 45 days to be sold to a new American parent company – a threat that TikTok dismissed by filing an injunction. In January, a Republican senator introduced a bill to ban TikTok for all Americans after it was already recently banned from all federal government work devices. Today, the Biden administration has stated that it wants Chinese owners to sell the app or face a possible ban. Many people (especially on Twitter) have been giving the US Congress some heat after their “abysmal performance” trying to ask questions to TikTok CEO Shou Chew in his testimony with regards to TikTok’s possible infringement on American security. Check out some examples below.
As you can see, the entire debate around TikTok is a hard thing to grasp for many people in the US government who maybe aren’t “hip” enough to ask questions and make informed decisions. Even further, since the start of attempting to blog my ideas with regards to the subject matter at hand, news of a RESTRICT Act has risen to the surface of some media outlets. If this gains some momentum, it will need an entirely new blog post to break it down. At first glance, it looks like the potential for a serious invasion of privacy. Hopefully it’s not true.
My theory? The US wants to ban TikTok because it feels threatened, not by the possibility of China knowing user’s interests (because every tech company knows that at this point), but by the fact that a Chinese company has simply risen to be in charge of (arguably) the biggest app in the world. US Congress is scrambling because it’s another large thing as of late that China is doing to prove themselves in the fight against the US to be the most advanced and powerful country in the world.
My writing is intended to be a discussion. Why do you think the US is pushing to try to ban the most popular app in the world? Can an app be too good? Let me know what you think in the comments below. Cheers.