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On March 10, two weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, the White House held a Zoom call with 30 prominent TikTok creators. Jen Psaki, then White House press secretary, and National Security Council staffers briefed the creators, who collectively had tens of millions of followers, on the latest news about the confrontation and the White House’s goals and priorities. The assembly followed a similar effort last summer, in which the White House recruited dozens of TikTokers to help inspire other young people to get vaccinated against Covid.
The app only became more popular in the following months. “We recognize that this is a critical path in how the American public discovers the latest news,” White House virtual chief strategy officer Rob Flaherty told the assembled group. then to make sure he had the latest information from an authoritative source. “At the same time, however, Biden’s management had been involved for more than a year in negotiations with ByteDance, the Chinese company that created and owns TikTok, over national security considerations. around the application. In fact, White House employees who organized and informed the creators of TikTok were not allowed to download the app on their mobile phones.
The administration’s contradictory approach to TikTok, its adoption of the app as an important conduit for the public, and its concern about the app as a potential tool for foreign influence, is perhaps an appropriate reaction to the very unique challenge that TikTok poses. . Seemingly overnight, TikTok controlled to remake American culture, be it high or low, from media and music to memes and celebrities, in its own image. TikTok made Olivia Rodrigo a household name and propelled Colleen Hoover onto the bestseller list, with more copies sold this year than the Bible. TikTok coined “silent shutdown,” one of the signature phrases of 2022, and brought in a whole new dialect of algospeak: “seggs,” “unalive,” “the dollar bean,” which is now sweeping across pop culture. Companies and brands from Goldfish crackers to Prada have funneled billions of advertising dollars into the platform in popularity of their global hit, which can, at any time, turn even a decades-old product into a must-have. ArrayObject. Last year, TikTok had more site visits than Google and more minutes of playback in the US than YouTube. It took Facebook almost nine years to be successful with a billion users; TikTok did it in five.
The app’s ordinary good luck is made all the more remarkable by the fact that it’s a product of America’s biggest geopolitical rival. Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society quite like TikTok. It’s hard to believe that a Russian or Iranian company, or, increasingly, even any other Chinese company, would pull off a similar feat. TikTok’s provenance has fueled longstanding and persistent considerations about its vulnerability to exploitation and manipulation by the Chinese government. In particular, over the past year, TikTok has faced a relentless stream of bad press, with each week likely to bring a new revelation about the company’s questionable knowledge practices and lopsided internal protections. In the past six months alone, TikTok and ByteDance have been accused of lying about China-based employees’ access to American user data, employing a news app to send pro-Beijing content abroad. and allowing Chinese state media accounts to operate without control or label. . while criticizing the American political process.
If TikTok’s popularity so far has given it some coverage of government action, time may be running out for the app. In November, Brendan Carr, commissioner of the F. C. C. , said it would be banned altogether. Sen. Mark Warner, co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said of a ban: “The faster we bite the bullet, the better. “Christopher Wray, director of the F. B. I. , told Congress he was “extremely concerned” about TikTok’s operations in the United States. Earlier this month, Senator Marco Rubio introduced legislation that would prevent TikTok from operating in the U. S. The U. S. government is banning all apps “subject to really broad influence” from China, Russia and other foreign adversaries.
Meanwhile, the Biden administration is reportedly close to reaching an agreement with TikTok. Speaking at a convention of generation leaders, Kemba Walden, deputy national director for cybersecurity, said the White House had not made a final resolution on a ban but expressed help for “any measure that provides security. “Maryland, South Dakota, South Carolina, Nebraska, Texas, Alabama and Utah have already banned the app from using public devices. A bill approved by the U. S. SenateLast week it would do the same at the federal level. The military has also banned the application to government apparatuses.
What goes unnoticed in those conversations is that TikTok is both a product of the West and China. ByteDance owes its lifestyle to the combination of ideas, capital, and others who have explained America’s more than five decades. U. S. The United States has sought to court China with the appeal of its style and the benefits of the existing foreign order, hoping that a liberalized market economy will herald domestic political reform. At the same time, Beijing seemed eager to expand its own tech sector as an engine of economic expansion and global economic power. The good fortune of a product like TikTok was just the ultimate visual example of a deeper technological symbiosis that once seemed inevitable.
But now the global has changed. In the United States, being difficult with China is one of the few spaces of two-component agreement. And in this challenging geopolitical context, TikTok is perceived as a Trojan horse: for Chinese influence, for espionage, or perhaps both. Meanwhile, in China, a major crackdown has sought to involve high-flying tech corporations and their founders, lest they, with their influence, independence, and popularity, choose force bases for the Chinese Communist Party. The crusade is just one component of a broader political and social chill that threatens to return the country to the Mao era. TikTok itself isn’t available in China: Users will have to access some other ByteDance app, which follows Chinese government rules on censorship and propaganda.
Just a few years ago, the rise of ByteDance seemed to be the harbinger of an era of Chinese app dominance. In fact, it would be difficult to locate a more consciously modeled company, either in spirit or substance, on American tech giants. The founder of ByteDance internalized the myth of Silicon Valley, taking as its center the idea, long promoted in Washington, that the American market is the ultimate reward and that welcomes any entrepreneur with the skill and ambition to succeed. On both sides of the Pacific, TikTok appears to be the last of its kind and the first. The company is caught between the old and the new: too Chinese for America, too American for China.
On Christmas Day 2010, a 27-year-old Chinese programmer with glasses named Zhang Yiming connected with Douban, a Chinese hybrid of Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads, to share his mind with a movie he had just seen. Zhang used his Douban account as a chronicle of his private development, recording the books he wished to read (“What would Google do?”, “Catch-22” and “Road to Serfdom”) and the movies he had seen (“The Dead,” “Good Will Hunting,” “Origin”). The movie Zhang saw this Christmas was “The Social Network. “Zhang was particularly interested in the film; he was only a year older than Mark Zuckerberg and, after several years of resurgence from small startups to an unfortunate stage at Microsoft, he recently had his own founder. Zhang’s company, 99fang, was a real asset search engine with ambitions to build something bigger. The story of Zuckerberg and his ruthless rise to the sensible was an inspiration and a warning. He gave it 4 stars out of five.
Born in 1983 as the only child of a librarian and nurse, Zhang came of age in a China plagued by reforms and new ties to the West. He moved to Tianjin to attend college, where he studied computer engineering. Zhang enjoyed the freedom presentó. de to generation and showed a penchant for the West, politically and culturally. In 2009, when the Chinese government blocked several websites, he turned to his private blog to express his disapproval, according to a profile in the Wall Street Journal. go out and wear a T-shirt that supports Google,” he wrote. If you block the Internet, I will write what I have to say on my clothes. “
In 2011, smartphone shipments in China surpassed those in the United States for the first time. On the Beijing subway, Zhang noticed fewer and fewer people reading newspapers; Instead, they turned to their phones to pass the time. Zhang, a restless entrepreneur, developed a concept for a new company, which would take credit for the rise of cell phones and the birth of the first synthetic intelligences. “Just as Zuckerberg founded Facebook to connect other people with other people, and Travis founded Uber to connect other people to cars,” he said later, that he sought to “connect other people with information. “
According to Zhang, the challenge with much of the web was the overwhelming number of features it presented to users. The online page was “a replaced form of information organization,” he told one interviewer: messy, vague and full of superfluous information. the RSS feed was a misfit, he wrote in a now-deleted blog post, because other people “were forced to notice for themselves ‘what I like and what I want. ‘In a meeting with an investor, Zhang drew on a napkin his vision of an incredible system, powered by synthetic intelligence: it would be the users who would locate the shape, and not the other way around. In early 2012, he introduced ByteDance.
One of the early backers brought Zhang about two dozen Chinese investors, but none of them were interested. It didn’t help that Zhang had such a childish face that, when he introduced himself, other people occasionally ignored him and talked to his colleagues. Most sensibly, Zhang was not an AI, nor was any of ByteDance’s early employees. there were still no Chinese texts and, according to Chinese Entrepreneur magazine, when Zhang tried to buy one that was in pre-publication, he was forced to back down. Zhang eventually taught himself how to write a tip engine from scattered resources on the Internet.
A few months after ByteDance realized it, Matt Huang, an American investor and venture capitalist, traveled to Beijing to observe the tech scene. A friend told him about ByteDance and arranged a meeting. When Huang arrived at the company’s offices, he noticed a modest Zhang supervising 20 other people trapped in two apartments. After two hours of conversation, Huang was in a position to invest in Zhang’s concept, despite doubts about the business model. person,” he said Huang. La most of his lingering doubts boiled down to the feasibility of applying AI. to a news app. But, he said, “I think if anybody is going to perceive it, it will be him. “
In August 2012, ByteDance released the first edition of Jinri Toutiao (“Today’s Headline”), an app using A. I. to, in Zhang’s words, “let each and every user, at each and every moment, see their own news page. “Other content platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, required users to manually collect friends and connections, whose posts were then incorporated into the user’s feed. Toutiao, on the other hand, didn’t care who you knew, only what you liked. No registration required, no desire to create an account and password, or describe interests or preferences. Users only gained pieces while downloading the app. Based on how a user reacted to a piece of content (read the entire article or just a few sentences, pause on a specific paragraph, reread anything again, leave a comment), the generation under Behind Toutiao began to generate an image of who the user and what they wanted.
Even better, the advice engine has taken a step forward with each use. It’s a virtuous circle: more users means more knowledge; more knowledge meant a smarter set of rules; a smarter rule set meant more users; And so on. The app reached one million daily average users just 4 months after its launch. From one point of view, revenue went from next to nothing in 2014 to $2. 5 billion in 2017. The bigger they were, the more Toutiao criticized. Critics said the app caters to the basest of human interests — celebrity gossip, scandals, crises, and violence — to keep users hooked for as long as possible. The average user spent more than an hour a day on the app and ToutiaoArray in terms of revenue, one of the fastest developing apps in the history of the web. Still, Zhang may only see the ceiling: According to the Chinese business press, an internal corporate assessment put the total length of China’s newsfeed market at around 240 million average daily users. If Toutiao were to claim part of the pie, it would peak at 120 million average daily users. To continue growing, the company had to look abroad.
But the momentum also reflected something more basic than business strategy. Chinese companies, Zhang said, “were born to be global,” just like U. S. companies. “There’s another kind of leadership, a thirst for growth,” said a former ByteDance executive. me. ” It’s a challenge, self-imposed: if big Western technology can do it, why can’t we?We are no less.
In 2014, Zhang traveled to Silicon Valley with an organization of Chinese founders, visiting the offices of Facebook, Tesla and Airbnb. He Xiaomi phones in the hands of US tech experts. The U. S. has heard talk about Alibaba’s highly anticipated IPO in the U. S. The U. S. expresses its emotions in its blog: “The Golden Age of Chinese Tech Corporations is coming. “
A lip-sync app called Musical. ly already leads the way. Launched in Shanghai by two Chinese entrepreneurs, Musical. ly was a wonderful success in the U. S. market, especially among teenagers. The emergence of Musical. ly intrigued ByteDance, which was looking for a new product to connect to its advisory engine. In March 2016, the company assigned a handful of workers to a new initiative called Project X, in order to replicate Musical. ly as much as possible. The team found that none of the existing Chinese video-sharing apps (there were many) had the generation to sync videos with soundtracks. The gap, about two hundred to three hundred milliseconds, small, but noticeable enough to discourage potential users. Repairing the synchronization factor is the starting point of promotion. of the new application, called Douyin (“Trembling Sound”).
Douyin was a game similar to Musical. ly’s pixel. When you opened the app, you were immediately immersed in a video, with no play or pause buttons. Swipe up and you can scroll through an endless stream of 15-second videos. , one after another, filling the entire phone screen. The interface was doubly effective: undeniable and intuitive for anyone to notice from the first use, as well as being designed to capture as much knowledge as can be imagined for the tip engine. . At maximum vertical scrolling, you’re presented with multiple elements at once, making it difficult for the platform to know what you’re looking for or thinking. By putting one video in front of you at a time, Douyin can better decipher the user’s reaction and use that knowledge to refine long-term advice.
Douyin has adopted a cunning technique to grow. While many other ByteDance products were aimed at older or more rural populations, Douyin primarily targeted other young people in China’s first-tier cities, the kind of users that other people were looking to emulate. “They built influencers,” Erin Huang, one of Douyin’s first contract designers, told me. “They weren’t yelling, ‘Use our app!’ They said, “Hey, do you see this person?” “You can be just like them. Growth exploded around February 2017, when demanding situations like “Dancing Like Taking a Bath” went viral on other Chinese social media platforms, attracting new users. and providing Douyin with more and more content. Array In May, the app had surpassed one million average daily users. Around the same time, Zhang contacted the founders of Musical. ly and provided them with an acquisition. According to an investor involved in the transaction. , Zhang thought that it would be better to have compatibility because each one had what the other needed. ByteDance featured algorithmic ability and business acumen; Musical. ly introduced a way to access the phones of millions of American teens, the world’s most valuable users.
According to a report by Benita Zhang, a prominent Chinese economic journalist, Musical. ly raised two key situations for a deal with ByteDance. First, the call of the application had to be changed, to lose the agreement with the lip syncing of the preteens. Second, ByteDance would spend at least $1 billion on marketing. Zhang agreed and acquired Musical. ly in November 2017 for about $1 billion. At this point, ByteDance had already created a foreign edition of Douyin, but we hadn’t decided how yet. Mix the new acquisition with the existing product.
The company also struggled to figure out what to call the new app. A ByteDance team compiled a list of English words and narrowed down the options. One option was “TikTok. ” It sounded great, but the team would have feared that, to Western ears, it would remind Western ears of the song Kesha from 2009. In the end, the imperatives of ByteDance’s global ambitions outweighed all concerns. “TikTok,” a mature call for virality: It may be pronounced the same way around the world, regardless of language, from Japan to India to Argentina. With a call like that, an app can take over the world.
ByteDance’s Beijing offices were in Haidian, at the center of China’s tech industry, and were established like any web company governed by millennials. The offices were arranged in long lines in the style of an Internet café, with a convention hall in the middle of the floor plan and retro-themed phone booths scattered throughout. Each corner had a break room filled with drinks and snacks. Even the most important leaders, such as Zhang Yiming, worked in shared offices.
Loyalty to American corporate culture was deep. Zhang was known to quote Jack Welch and Steve Jobs, especially Jobs’ mandate to “stay hungry, stay dumb. “When Zhang organized an e-book exchange within the company, the name he chose was “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. ” The first precept of ByteDance’s corporate culture, reinforced through banners and posters throughout the workplace (including, occasionally, restrooms), is “Always Day 1,” a maxim drawn directly from Amazon.
Zhang wore a T-shirt and jeans almost every day and insisted that everyone call him by his first name, Yiming, a rarity in the formal world and obsessed with the prestige of Chinese companies, especially for a high-level founder. “I hate formality, I hate hypocrisy,” Zhang told an interviewer. He himself was a regular Douyin user, creating videos and experimenting with new stickers. At lunchtime, Zhang waited in the same line as the rest of the staff. The concept that executives would have individual elevators, which is not unusual in giant companies, was “very cheesy,” he once wrote in a memo to employees.
But according to interviews with current and former ByteDance painters, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of professional consequences, the company was caught between the cultures it sought to bridge. Employees say they had to paint “ninenine6,” which means 9 a. m. to 9 p. m. , six days a week, 72 hours, a popular time for Chinese generation companies. During this early era of expansion, calls with overseas offices ran until midnight, and important meetings were held on Sundays. ByteStyle, the company’s code of values, preaches a culture that may have been taken wholesale from Google or Amazon: diverse, inclusive, radically fair, and transparent. But talking about wages was “a line drawn in blood,” said one former employee, and talking to the press was surely off limits. The design was flat, especially through the popular Chinese ones: ByteDance got rid of the titles of the lead positions and gave all painters access to other painters’ metrics, adding Zhang’s. But it was still transparent which way the orders were flowing, and managers were rarely questioned.
“ByteDance works like a machine,” said one former worker. In China, the company is nicknamed Super App Factory, due to the popularity of its simplified formula for generating new products. (On one account, ByteDance had more than 140 apps under its umbrella between 2018 and 2020. )The highest point of organization and formulation is one of the strengths of the company, as it allows immediate progress and growth. But it can also be bloodless and dehumanizing. ” Their goals are made public and they instill the mantra that your colleagues are your competitors, your friends,” the worker said. “It’s like a boiler room, a Wall Street boiler room. “
When the company’s overseas expansion began, all staff members were invited to learn English. Zhang was also briefed and talked about e-books he had heard on “Speak English,” a popular ESL app, such as Eckhart Tolle’s e-book “The Power of Now. “In 2020, ByteDance hired 40,000 new workers, an average of 150 in a business day, many outside China and the maximum in pandemic conditions. Some Chinese workers have been angered by the consequences of overseas expansion. “Chinese workers may have applied for ByteDance for years, and they didn’t need to start reading English or talking to foreigners or converting corporate values,” another former worker told me. “To many other people in the Beijing office, they felt they were wasting their business because of Yiming’s conquest of foreign markets. “ok on their LinkedIn profiles, not to mention ByteDance.
The onboarding has also been confusing for foreign workers, especially those who came to ByteDance after holding leadership positions at major U. S. tech companies. U. S. Having won promises of autonomy and independence, they find it difficult to accept that the ideal authority belonged to Beijing. “The United States has been so accustomed for so long to being the standard-setting and arbiter of trade practices, to being the domestic market and the headquarters, that it is not in the American psyche to be one of the regions,” said the former worker at the time. “Americans aren’t used to not getting their way. “
What we before using unnamed resources. Do resources know the information?What is your motivation for telling us?Can we corroborate the information? Even with those questions met, the Times uses anonymous resources as a last resort. The journalist and at least one editor know the identity of the source.
For foreign workers at the Beijing headquarters, the role of cultural translator is a must-have component of the job. When ByteDance tried to internationalize one of its short video products, the first former worker remembered, he called to consult. In China, the product known as Xigua Shipin (“Watermelon Video”), and the internationalization team announced that it had selected a foreign name: “Ripe Melons”. He told them they couldn’t call him that. ” They said, ‘Why?'” said the former worker. I said, “Trust me, you can’t. ” They come up with it as a wonderful name. I said, “Melons are a slang word for women’s breasts. “They said, “No, those are melons that are fresh. ” The product was eventually called BuzzVideo.
Gliding through cultures as a web-age anthropologist was one component of what made running on TikTok engaging and new. When the app was first introduced, each country and market had a slightly different propensity. Thai users liked videos of other people dancing in school; Japanese users liked funny videos about otakus, other young people obsessed with anime, manga, and video games; Vietnamese users especially appreciated the camera’s skillful paintings. The U. S. The U. S. government proved harder to break, until TikTok’s product managers allowed users to push the creation of a new category: It turned out that Americans had an attachment to memes.
But Array ByteDance’s immediate expansion overseas has resulted in a strange mix. “TikTok’s culture is incredibly Chinese in a way that is contrary to advertising material, in a way that surprises foreigners,” the former worker said at the time. “But on the other hand, it’s a much more foreign tech company than most Chinese people have worked before. “In Beijing and overseas offices, turnover was highest as workers were exhausted due to long operating hours, coordination of time zones and crop juggling. But good fortune in the end brought its own kind of stability. “It’s become a mainstream tech company — we attract other people from Google, Facebook, Snapchat, consulting firms and top-tier firms,” said one existing U. S. worker. “It doesn’t look like a Chinese pariah company in any way anymore. “
As ByteDance drove overseas, China changed. When Zhang introduced the company in 2012, Xi Jinping had not yet gained strength, and it was still imaginable to believe that the country was embarking on a path, but slow and uneven, towards greater reform and opening-up. But under Xi, that hope has been stifled . Since taking office, he has embarked on a broad reassertion of state strength. Among Xi’s priorities is a widespread crackdown on big tech, as part of a broader effort to curb private enterprise. operating in China, the country’s domestic giants have been tolerated, if not fed. But fearing that the wealth and influence of tech corporations could threaten component strength and economic stability, the Chinese government has punished, fined and regulated the sector according to component objectives. One by one, China’s most important corporations and their founders fell under the hammer.
When Ant Group, Alibaba’s currency arm, was nearing an initial public offering. was to be the world’s largest, the government ordered its suspension and soon after announced an investigation into Alibaba’s alleged monopolistic practices. The company’s charismatic founder, Jack Ma, briefly disappeared. In April 2021, Chinese regulators called executives from nearly 3 dozen of the country’s largest tech corporations, ordering them to “learn from Alibaba” and conduct a “full self-inspection” within a month. In July, Didi, the Chinese edition of Uber, was ordered to halt new rider sign-ups just two days after the company’s US IPO; the company announced that it would delist a few months later. New regulations revealed soon after required web corporations with more than a million users to apply for government permission before the board on foreign inventory exchanges. Once noted as the embodiment of China’s economic dynamism and the vehicle of China’s comfortable strength abroad, the country’s tech sector has been reminded that it exists at the mercy of Beijing.
A series of laws have clarified the government’s priorities. The Cyber Security Act and the National Intelligence Law, each of which came into force in 2017, have created positive legal jobs for Chinese companies and citizens to assist in research and intelligence. collection activities of State organs. ” Every organization or citizen must support, lend a hand and cooperate with the intelligence cadres of the State in accordance with the law,” establishes the National Intelligence Law, “and keep secret any knowledge of the state’s intelligence cadres. “In 2021, two new data protection laws confirmed the Chinese state’s extraterritorial success in all data on Chinese citizens anywhere in the world.
Communist Party cells, which are an integral component of China’s state-owned enterprises, have played a more important and vital role in the overall economy. Under Chinese law, all organizations with more than 3 members must form a component cell, which reports directly to the component’s bureaucracy and occasionally exercises control over business decisions. Companies advertise the activities of their Party cells as a means of ingratiating themselves with the state. “At the end of the day, the Chinese state has all the cards,” he said. Jordan Schneider, China analyst at Rhodium Group and host of the “ChinaTalk” podcast. “Companies and their leaders have learned that delaying government demands too much can have serious consequences. “
In late 2017, when ByteDance surpassed $20 billion in valuation, government regulators ordered updates from several popular verticals in Jinri Toutiao to be paused for 24 hours. The app, regulators said, “spread pornographic and vulgar information” and “caused an effect on public opinion online. “ByteDance announced it would rent 2,000 new “content reviewers,” giving preference to party members. The company also closed the bankruptcy of the Gossipy Society and created a new vertical called New Era, with state media coverage.
A few months later, ByteDance dumped one of its short video products from retail app stores after state media accused the platform of glorifying a young woman’s pregnancy and hosting classified ads for fake products. Within a week, Jinri Toutiao also temporarily got rid of the app. Regulators then ordered ByteDance to shut down the company’s oldest product, a fun app called Neihan Duanzi (“Subtle Jokes”). The app’s content, a combination of not-so-subtle jokes and comic strip videos, had “caused a strong dislike among netizens,” the government said.
At about four o’clock in the morning Beijing time, the day after the measures were announced, Zhang issued a lengthy apology. He said he couldn’t sleep, that he was full of regret and guilt. Neihan Duanzi had no respectable “basic socialist values,” Zhang said. “In recent years, the regulatory government has provided us with many recommendations and assistance, but in our hearts we have not fully understood or recognized it. “For that, he repented and thanked the leadership of the government. “Developing the start-up after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, we deeply perceived that our immediate progression was an opportunity that presented itself through this wonderful era,” Zhang wrote. “I am grateful for this time. I am grateful for the historic opportunity for economic reform and opening-up, and I am grateful for the government’s help in advancing the generation industry.
In order for ByteDance to improve its understanding and implementation of the “four consciousnesses” of Xi Jinping’s idea and conform to the “orientations of public opinion”, the company will “strengthen the work of building the party”, deepen cooperation with the party’s media, and “strengthen the system of editor responsibility”, a role that includes, just a few years earlier, Zhang said ByteDance didn’t want to, as it would prioritize an individual’s personal tastes over the aggregate wisdom of all users in the company.
The contrast with Zhang’s blog post from a decade earlier, when he criticized Google’s ouster, was striking. It is unlikely that Zhang, who was not a member of the party, felt a wonderful love for the demands of the party. Maybe it had changed; He now had a billion-dollar business and the livelihood of tens of thousands of employees. But, in any case, China did.
First, the major U. S. platforms are not allowed to do so. The U. S. saw little to worry about on TikTok. No Chinese platform had conquered the U. S. market. Despite all that TikTok had gained from the Musical. ly deal in terms of users, it would most likely pay. dull in terms of long-term growth plazo. Musical. ly had swept away a preteen audience and then stagnated; there was little explanation for why to think TikTok would fare differently. Also, TikTok wasn’t a social network at all. The explanation for why other people wanted to be on Facebook, Snap or Instagram was because their friends were there. “People’s idea the social network was the origin of the moat; that’s why it’s hard to compete with Facebook,” one of ByteDance’s most sensible advisers told me. It was noted that major players in U. S. social media are not in the U. S. Separate for antitrust reasons.
On the contrary, China’s newcomer seemed to be smart news. In 2018, ByteDance spent nearly a billion dollars on advertising for TikTok, with a budget that would have doubled for 3 consecutive quarters. TikTok has covered Facebook, Instagram, Snap and other U. S. social media platforms. U. S. with ads. TikTok accelerated speed in 2019, handing out $3 million per day in the U. S. alone. Most of which are for Snap executives. any risk from TikTok, he appreciated the expense. ” We were buying so many ads, the cash was mind-blowing,” said a former ByteDance employee. Snap’s response, he recalls, was, “What can we do to keep this going?”
At the time, the 30-day retention rate for TikTok users was rumored to be only 10%. By the criteria of major social media companies, TikTok suffers: it burns money without looking like anything for it. But ByteDance bets on another game. Before it could take off, TikTok’s set of advice rules had to be trained to figure out what was cool, this time for an American audience. Data from Musical. ly users provided a first portion, but to make TikTok an attractive product, the set of rules needed to feed on as much knowledge as possible. “It’s about attracting other people, other people, other people,” a former executive at an American social media company told me. “The more people we receive, the more he will learn,” and the more people we can get. It’s the guide wheel. “
In mid-2019, other platforms began to realize that TikTok wouldn’t go away. The app had eclipsed the average hundred million daily users worldwide and created its first original superstar in artist Lil Nas X, turning TikTok into a launching pad for music fame. Then, with the pandemic forcing entire countries to shut down in 2020, TikTok thrived like never before. According to Chinese business press reports, TikTok gained an average of 110 million daily users between March and April alone. In Iraq, TikTok had 40% of the country’s overall mobile web population as monthly active users, despite a lack of advertising, promotion or awareness there. Mobile intelligence corporation Apptopia estimated that TikTok was downloaded 89 million times in the US. In the first part of Only in the year, according to corporate studies by Sensor Tower, the app recorded more than 620 million international downloads.
For Facebook in particular, the risk is acute. The platform bleeds young users and engagement sinks; his fortune seemed to be collapsing just as TikTok’s fortune was growing. ByteDance also attacked Facebook executives, adding Instagram’s head of public policy for Asia Pacific and Facebook’s public policy executives for Indonesia and Japan.
In a speech at Georgetown University in October 2019, Zuckerberg drew the lines of war. He covered Facebook, which had tried unsuccessfully for years to enter the Chinese market, with the American flag, portraying the struggle between the two platforms as a struggle for freedom as opposed to oppression. “China is building its own Internet on other values and is now exporting its vision of the Internet to other countries,” he said. He pointed to the strong encryption protections on WhatsApp, a Facebook product, and its use through protesters around the world. world. In contrast, he said, TikTok would have censored discussions, even in the United States. “Is this the Internet we want?” Asked.
According to Wall Street Journal reports, at a dinner with President Trump on the same scale in Washington, Zuckerberg pressed Trump about the risk Chinese web corporations posed to American corporations. Shutting down Chinese platforms deserves to be a top priority over considerations about Facebook’s hegemony. , he allegedly argued. (A Facebook representative said Zuckerberg didn’t forget to talk specifically about TikTok. )Facebook has launched its major lobbying operation, meeting with lawmakers and White House staff to fan the flames against the Chinese app.
TikTok had opened an office in Washington before that year, with just one employee. Sitting at the intersection of 3 of the most debatable issues in U. S. politics. In the US: China, big tech and social media, TikTok knew it would come under scrutiny. In no way is this not hard work,” said one user familiar with TikTok’s lobbying operations.
When Facebook’s crusade began, the workplace had just begun its awareness crusade in Washington. According to someone who attended a September 2019 event at the Langham Hotel in Pasadena, Zhang asked officials at SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate and one of ByteDance’s biggest investors, for recommendations on how to staff a D. C. operation. In a blink of an eye. The hiring speed picked up later in the fall when Zuckerberg filed a lawsuit against the Chinese companies. The resulting ByteDance lobbying team, a Washington who’s who, comprised of former congressional aides from leaders of both parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; Kevin McCarthy, House Minority Leader; Chuck Schumer, Senate Majority Leader; and Jim Clyburn, Democratic House whip. From just over $500,000 in 2019, ByteDance’s lobbying budget grew eightfold in 2020, then nearly doubled the following year. “They literally went from one user to about 30 in a year and a half,” the user familiar with TikTok’s lobbying operations told me. “It’s one of the biggest surges I’ve ever seen. “
In mid-July 2020, President Trump, Vice President Pence, and cabinet members gathered in the White House cabinet room for a meeting. a brief discussion. ” It is transparent that there is more or less unanimity that TikTok is a risk to national security,” said one user present. “The discussion about how to deal with it. “
Administration officials had begun raising awareness on Capitol Hill about TikTok in early 2019. At the time, the administration was preparing a series of moves opposed to Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company, and TikTok gave the impression of raising some of the same considerations about knowledge. Privacy and the influence of the Chinese government. But while TikTok gains popularity, it’s still limited to an audience small enough to prevent it from being a government priority. “There’s hope it’s a passing fad, like Myspace,” said a Trump White House official, who requested anonymity to discuss internal government deliberations. “That it would just fade away. “
In 2020, it was transparent that this would not happen. TikTok’s developing domain has raised two main concerns: First, that the knowledge gathered about U. S. users is not yet a major concern. the rules themselves can be used to further the Chinese government’s foreign policy goals, either by selling pro-Beijing content or suppressing prospects deemed objectionable. In the past, the company had been accused of censoring content deemed politically sensitive in China, as well as cutting or burying videos similar to Black Lives Matter, the Hong Kong protests and the crackdown on Uighurs in China’s Xinjiang province (TikTok said those are transient issues that don’t reflect how the app works lately).
Trump’s closet has thought of 3 options. The first to let the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States take the lead. CFIUS, an interagency organization tasked with assessing the national security implications of foreign investment, had already opened an investigation into ByteDance’s acquisition of Musical. ly. The committee would make advice to the president, suggesting a complete divestment of Musical. ly, a death sentence for TikTok in its largest market, or mitigation measures that may allay government concerns. The option of the moment, favored by the US Treasury Secretaryallow TikTok to remain a Chinese company but operate in partnership with a US company, which would host its data servers on US soil.
The third option, a total ban on enforcement. The Indian government had already banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps on national security grounds, following fatal border clashes with China. In the United States, a similar technique would require a solid and well-developed legal theory, taking into account First Amendment considerations and the difference between objectionable publishers, which cannot be banned, and a foreign-owned platform.
In presenting him with 3 options, Trump chose the most striking and legally questionable: a total ban. The previous month, TikTok users played a sham on Trump’s re-election crusade by organizing others around the world to sign up for a rally in Tulsa with no goal of running. Brad Parscale, chairman of Trump’s re-election crusade, tweeted that they had won more than a million requests for price tickets; About 6200 more people finally showed up. The failed rally appears to have put TikTok on the president’s radar. Decisions. Trump issued an executive order preventing new TikTok downloads and updates in the U. S. UU. si the company does not sell to a U. S. customer. U. S. within forty-five days. Eight days later, CFIUS concluded its investigation and recommended that the president order divestment.
The weeks since Trump’s announced ban have been a circus to compete with everything the leadership has produced to date. Seeing the possibility of grabbing the world’s most popular app at a reduced price, the contenders rushed in. Apparently, each and every major U. S. tech company is in the U. S. to seek a deal, adding Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Finally, the outlines of an agreement were found. Walmart and Oracle would jointly buy a stake in a new U. S. -based entity. ByteDance would remain the main shareholder. Oracle would monitor the application data, making sure that non-public data of U. S. users would be subject to non-public data. UU. se stored only in the U. S. At the same time, ByteDance has reportedly stepped up efforts already underway to shift more control of the company to Singapore.
Zhang reportedly learned of the proposed ban when a friend sent him a link to a Trump interview. From his base in Beijing, Zhang kept the U. S. hours of operation, meeting with advisers and investors on how to respond. He wrote a letter to his employees, reiterating his preference for leading “a trusted global company. “In China, Zhang’s letter garnered many harsh responses, condemning him as a traitor, coward, and American puppet, referring to his early blog posts that portrayed American culture and politics favorably. Zhang slightly deserved to be called Chinese, some angry commentators said online; In fact, he was a Jingmei Fenzi, an “American at heart. “
And then, as capriciously as it had erupted, the drama subsided. After the 2020 election, the proposed deal was shelved and Trump’s management appeared to be the factor entirely. Although Biden temporarily rescinded Trump’s executive order, CFIUS’ divestment order remained in effect. TikTok has been left in limbo: it operates normally in all appearances, but with the persistent risk of a ban or other government action constantly at the top.
Biden’s management entered the workplace promising to repudiate his predecessor in taste and substance. But Chinese policy, and Chinese generation politics in particular, has represented a transparent continuity. Biden’s management has come to see technological advances as a zero-sum game that America won’t have to lose. Until now, the centerpiece of Biden’s China generation policy has been a set of sweeping restrictions on selling the most complex semiconductor chips and chip-making gadgets to China. Semiconductors are the lifeblood of the virtual era, powering each and every industry and box in which the U. S. competes. From the U. S. and China, from autonomous cars and synthetic intelligence to supercomputing and complex missiles. to any software manufactured in the U. S. U. S. parts needed to manufacture the chips.
Under the policy, any “U. S. person” (citizens, permanent residents, anyone living in the country, and U. S. corporations) will have to obtain a license from the government to work with a Chinese company in the production of complex semiconductors. the restrictions appear designed to stifle China’s tech industry before it can catch up with the United States. The technological dissociation between the United States and China, once considered an excessive option, is now debated only in its details: when, how and where. “It will manifest itself through trade, investment, other people and ideas,” said Schneider, an analyst at Rhodium Group. The Biden administration’s China technology policy is a gap in TikTok’s length.
Part of the explanation for why TikTok has escaped scrutiny faced by other Chinese corporations (or even other U. S. social media giants). UU) It’s because the user base is very young. According to the Pew Reseek Center, two-thirds of users ages 13 to 17 — seniors in the U. S. Few lawmakers or regulators even perceive TikTok. The opacity of the application also presented a shield. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, TikTok does not share data with researchers or allow third parties to examine the platform. (Last month, TikTok said it was preparing a beta version of a platform search tool. )
The controversies surrounding TikTok have done little to curb the app’s boom. In September 2021, the company announced that it had reached one billion per month of active users, meaning it had added new users at an average rate of nearly 550,000 per month. day for five consecutive years. Even with the ban in India, TikTok is the world’s highest-downloaded and highest-grossing non-gaming app in the early part of this year. Between Douyin and TikTok, more than a billion people around the world use a ByteDance App for one and both days. In Douyin alone, the average cumulative usage time in a day is about 90,000 years.
Facebook, which rebranded itself Meta in 2021, continues to pressure Washington for help. According to emails notified by The Washington Post, the company hired one of the largest Republican consulting firms in the country to carry out a national public crusade against TikTok. The company, Targeted Victory, has published opinion columns and letters to the editor in regional newspapers, encouraged journalists and politicians to dig deeper into TikTok and helped spread damaging news. The overall purpose is to “convey the message that while Meta is the existing punching bag, TikTok is the genuine threat, especially as a foreign app that is No. 1 in sharing the knowledge young teens use,” one cupboard leader wrote in a February email.
TikTok has proven to be a mature target. Over the summer, BuzzFeed reported audio leaks from dozens of internal corporate meetings that revealed that, contrary to TikTok’s public claims, China-based employees were still accessing knowledge about U. S. users. U. S. Soon after, BuzzFeed reported that ByteDance had used TopBuzz, a now-shut down the U. S. news app. The U. S. government is inspired by Toutiao, to spread pro-China content to users, while censoring articles critical of Beijing. (ByteDance denied this, calling it “ridiculous. “) More recently, Forbes found that Chinese state media accounts thrive on TikTok, occasionally peddling attacks on express American politicians and the state of U. S. establishments. The U. S. is generally the U. S. Forbes also reported that a team at ByteDance’s headquarters planned to use TikTok to track the location of express U. S. users. In the US, precisely the nightmare situation that critics had warned about. Taken together, those stories have only amplified considerations that TikTok can’t be trusted with its strength over U. S. knowledge and attention span. U. S.
The company’s reaction did little to allay concerns. Instead of acknowledging the risks unique to its situation, corporate officials have sought to steer TikTok away from its Chinese origins and ownership as much as possible. TikTok claimed, for example, that it is not a Chinese company because the legal entity that owns TikTok and all businesses in China is registered in the Cayman Islands. TikTok and ByteDance executives have also continually stated, adding sworn testimony before Congress, that TikTok has never provided knowledge of the user to the Chinese government, nor would it if told. asked, a claim that the company will knowingly violate Chinese law. “If you look at other people making analogies between Google and Facebook and TikTok, they’re either unsophisticated or have an axe to grind in favor of TikTok,” said Dan Harris, a lawyer who works with foreign corporations in China and writes the China Law Blog. “Most other serious people see a difference. That’s not to say they’re all wonderful or all bad, but there’s a difference.
TikTok reportedly moved forward on a deal with Biden’s management that would allow the app to retain Chinese ownership and maintain its knowledge of the U. S. user. U. S. serversThis agreement is unlikely to satisfy anyone, but all available answers are imperfect. A total ban, especially one aimed at Chinese corporations in general, runs risks akin to Sinophobia and also, somewhat counterintuitively, acceptance of the Chinese Communist Party’s view that each and every citizen and entity in China is a voluntary appendage of the party. Attention to the potential dangers posed by a company like TikTok is to ignore the political, economic and social infrastructure that the Chinese government under Xi has spent more than a decade building.
Whatever happens with ByteDance, classes for China’s next entrepreneur are sobering. “He can do what ByteDance is looking to do: get a Singapore passport and integrate into it,” said Ivan Kanapathy, former director for China, Taiwan and Monpasslia on the Security Council’s National Personal Staff. “There’s no answer if you’re in China. Si you need to be a global technology company, that’s all. You can’t have both. If you need the Chinese market, move to China. If you need the West, move to the West. That’s where we’re going. I have no doubt. “
In May 2021, Zhang Yiming announced that he would step down from his position as CEO of ByteDance for the next six months. It’s time for him to take on a new role, Zhang said in a letter to employees, either to avoid the trap of fitting too much into the center of the organization and to help stimulate the kind of long-term thinking that would lead to ByteDance’s next project. breakthrough. ” The fact is, I lack some of the skills that make an ideal manager,” he wrote. She enjoyed spending time alone, reading, being online, and dreaming about the future.
A few months later, news broke that the Chinese government had acquired a stake in a subsidiary of ByteDance. The subsidiary held operating licenses for some of the company’s largest Chinese companies. Although the stake is small: 1%, divided between the China Internet Investment Fund; China Media Group, controlled through the propaganda department of the Communist Party; and the investment arm of Beijing’s municipal government: the implications were inevitable. The Chinese government held one of the 3 seats on the board of directors of the subsidiary, exercising a point of influence disproportionate to its nominal participation.
Zhang reportedly spent most of his year in Singapore, to escape the onerous restrictions and lockdowns of China’s “zero covid” policy. But it’s not hard to see relocation motivated by other factors. “I don’t think Zhang Yiming is so interested in being a tool of a government,” Schneider said. “I think he needs to build an online empire and make a lot of money. The State.
In 2016, just after the release of Douyin, Zhang gave a long and wide-ranging interview to the Chinese magazine Caijing. Although Toutiao is a well-established success, Zhang is not yet a familiar call in China and is almost unknown abroad. During the interview, Zhang talked about human nature, corruption, integrity, the books that influenced him, the importance of backward gratification, and many other things. Anything other than work.
Toward the end, the interviewer asked Zhang about his reputation for being incredibly realistic, “like a robot. “Zhang responded that not facing the truth creates disruption in people. “The most productive way to wait for the long term is to create it. “He said, “but only if you face it. “
Alex W. Palmer collaborates with the magazine. His 2019 canopy story in the D. E. A. The investigation into the death of a North Dakota teenager from a fentanyl overdose was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Pablo Delcan is a Spanish designer and art director. In 2014 he founded Delcan
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