With 1bn downloads, ByteDance’s TikTok has become China’s first major social media hit abroad. In 2018, about 1.5 times more users downloaded it than its rival, Instagram. The rise of a Chinese-owned app with tens of millions of users in the US and elsewhere highlights that regulating social media and other technology platform companies is not just about taming the Silicon Valley giants. The challenge is all the greater in a global environment where tech regulation is highly fragmented.
ByteDance, which recently became the world’s most valuable privately held company at $75bn, acquired a Shanghai-based app already popular in the US called Musical.ly in 2017. It folded it into TikTok last year. A competitor to Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, TikTok enables its often teenage users to upload short videos of themselves dancing or lip-syncing to songs. TechCrunch has called it “the Instagram for the mobile video age”. Its success is noteworthy. Chinese apps have largely failed to make inroads outside the Middle Kingdom. Tencent’s WeChat platform struggled to make headway overseas amid privacy and censorship fears.
But the US Federal Trade Commission last week fined TikTok $5.7m for alleged pre-merger violations by Musical.ly of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The FTC said the app was collecting personal information, including email addresses from children under 13, without parental consent. The issue is sensitive at a time when YouTube is facing concerns that has been facilitating paedophile networks on its comment sections.