Zhang Yiming, China’s tenth richest person according to the Forbes Rich list, is the founder of ByteDance

Should TikTok be banned?

Zhang Yiming, China’s tenth richest person according to the Forbes Rich list, is the founder of ByteDance
Zhang Yiming, China’s tenth richest person according to the Forbes Rich list, is the founder of ByteDance

TikTok with strong links to China is the latest company to come under attack as tensions between President Xi’s China and President Donald Trump’s US escalate.

India has already taken it off app stores as Australia and the US are considering banning the app.

TikTok a free app like a short-form version of YouTube where users can post videos up to one minute long and choose from a huge database of songs and filters. Once a user gets more than 1000 followers, they can also broadcast live to their fans and accept digital gifts that can be exchanged for money. Private messaging is also available between users.

The Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns sparked a surge in interest propelling Tiktok and its sister app Douyin, which is available in mainland China, to two-million downloads worldwide with about 800 million active users.

TikTok started as three different apps.

The first was a US app Musical.ly, which was launched in 2014. In 2016, Chinese tech giant Bytedance launched a similar service in China called Douyin. Bytedance expanded globally under TikTok. In 2018, Bytedance purchased Musical.ly and folded it into its TikTok operation.

ByteDance attempted to distance its app from its Chinese ownership, appointing former senior Disney executive Kevin Mayer as CEO of TikTok.

TikTok collected a large amount of data including the recent revelation that it was regularly reading the copy-and-paste clipboards of users, which is comparable to other data-hungry social networks such as Facebook.

However, like with Huawei, the arguments against TikTok seem to be based around the theoretical possibility of the Chinese government compelling ByteDance under local laws to hand over data on foreign users. 2017, National Security Law in China compels any organisation or citizen to “ support, assist and co-operate with the state intelligence work” in accordance with the law.

Last year, the Guardian reported that TikTok’s staff and automated systems had enforced moderation rules that censored material deemed to be politically sensitive footage of Tiananmen Square protests and Tibetan independence demands were among the material said to have been banned or restricted.

ByteDance said the guidelines referred to had since been phased out.

Zhang Yiming, China’s tenth richest person according to the Forbes Rich list, is the founder of ByteDance.