A Washington Post article from last week, which includes the heading "TikTok Rise Could Signal End To Western Web Dominance" in the print version, describes a Chinese social media platform called TikTok as follows:
TikTok has quickly become one of America’s most popular mobile apps, a flashy, frenetic, video playground beloved by teens and downloaded more than 110 million times across the U.S. With its blend of goofy memes, fast-twitch skits and chart-topping earworms like “Old Town Road,” the app has quickly become China’s most successful social-media export abroad and a global phenomenon, installed by 1.3 billion users around the world.
The article then explains various aspects of the app and its regulation that could, in my view, lead to trade and other tensions:
But researchers have grown worried that the app could also prove to be one of China’s most effective weapons in the global information war, bringing Chinese-style censorship to mainstream U.S. audiences and shaping how they understand real-world events. Compounding researchers’ concerns are TikTok’s limited public comments about the content it removes and its purported independence from censors in Beijing.
TikTok’s parent company ByteDance said in a statement that U.S. user data is stored domestically and that the app’s content and moderation policies in the U.S. are led by a U.S.-based team not influenced by the Chinese government. ByteDance repeatedly declined to make executives available for on-the-record interviews.
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The company declined to provide details of how the app is policed in the U.S. or how the U.S. team shields itself from being influenced by authorities in Beijing, where ByteDance is headquartered. Officials in the Chinese embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
TikTok’s surging popularity spotlights the tension between the Web’s global powers: the United States, where free speech and competing ideologies are held as (sometimes messy) societal bedrocks, and China, where political criticism is forbidden as troublemaking.
TikTok’s Chinese counterpart, researchers say, remains captive to the ruling regime’s ideas of appropriate content and censorship, and they point to the way the nation’s Communist Party has used it as a propaganda vessel for young audiences that might otherwise not seek out state-media news.
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TikTok’s parent company has offered limited information about its mix of human and algorithmic censors, which scan videos and remove blacklisted words and images. The company’s chief said last year it would employ 10,000 moderators to flag and remove content following a crackdown from Chinese regulators targeting the app’s “improper content.”
Many of the biggest social media companies are American-owned, but there are some based in other countries, and I'm wondering if we could see something like a traditional manufactured goods trade war play out in the social media sector. It's not hard to imagine a social media company going to its government and saying, "Hey, this foreign competitor of ours is engaging in bad practices and you should place restrictions on their business."
When thinking about what trade conflict might look like here, it seems to me that there are several key factors to take into account in relation to the market competition and government trade policy battles that may arise:
- What are the censorship policies that the company employs, and how transparent is the company about them?
- How does the company use its customers' data? What are its privacy policies?
- Where does the company store its customers' data?
- Which government(s) have oversight of the company's policies and behavior?
Putting aside the trade war angle for a moment, in my view, there is a large, untapped market for social media companies that have reasonable and transparent censorship policies, that use customers' data on a limited basis if at all, and that operate in jurisdictions that have laws in place that limit governments themselves from accessing customers' data or censoring content. I am rooting for all of the smaller companies who currently operate in this space.
But for now, what we mostly see in many parts of the world is a bunch of dominant U.S. companies who rely heavily on user data, and perhaps some rising Chinese competitors who do the same, with very different regulatory regimes in place in the two countries. (And in China, the Chinese companies have the home market to themselves, due to various restrictions.) Unfortunately, that seems like a recipe for another front in the trade war.
