TikTok: China's path to the top?
If you haven’t been sleeping under a rock for the past year, I am sure you are aware of the social network behemoth, TikTok. Its premise is rather simple: after you download it you get a never-ending feed of short videos with people doing things ranging from dances to political campaigning. You can share these videos with your friends and even possibly make your own.
The app is owned by Beijing-based technology company ByteDance and has surpassed 2 billion downloads, becoming wildly popular in its relatively brief existence, and therefore to a large extent shaping the way in which Generation Z communicates and interacts with one another. Being as influential as TikTok has now become, it goes without saying that the information the platform handles and manipulates has brought with it a great deal of concerns. Added onto that is the concern that the Chinese government could potentially use this information for surveillance purposes and to their own political ends as a result.
TikTok has not only become a place of self-expression for a generation attempting to find its place in the world, but also the geopolitical controversy through which political allegiances and conflicts have become clearest. With the news that U.S. Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has called for staff to delete the app from their phones due to vague “security reasons,” the nationwide bans placed and being hinted at being placed in the future, particularly within the U.S., this is perhaps more evident now than ever.
A blanket ban on the app has been manipulated as a tool to indicate cleavages between the political agenda of China and other governments more so than anything. The lethal border dispute between rising power India and China led to just this, allegedly as a means of establishing security measures. Removing the app takes away any potential hold that China might have in India in terms of information, but more importantly, any possible legitimacy that China might have gained through the app’s image altogether.
Like most social media platforms (i.e. Facebook), Tik Tok manages to store a user’s location, browser history, age, phone numbers, and potential payment information if provided at will. This has set many politicians on edge, with Australian Senator Jim Molan calling the app “a data collection service disguised as social media,” despite the fact that the company has claimed it probably stores less information than other Western based social media apps in general. Its presence has been so non transparent that this statement could possibly be true, especially considering the scandals Facebook particularly has been involved with in rigging election numbers and manipulating political data in the past few years.
One might call the app itself a massive win for the expansion of Chinese influence through soft power mechanisms, seeing as beforehand no Chinese company had gained as much worldwide influence as TikTok now has. Surveillance concerns aside, the fact of the matter is that without requiring complicated espionage strategy, China has to an extent been able to extend itself into the phones of billions worldwide, drawing attention to its capacities as a great power. The values and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, therefore, could easily follow suit the way that American values have been able to do for decades through mechanisms like Hollywood. The implications of this could either be ghastly or positive, and it all depends on the lens through which you view Great Power politics in the greater scheme of things.
Though ByteDance has denied multiple times any kind of potential involvement in politics and claims to work separately from the interests of mainland China (being headed by an American CEO, etc.), there are certain inconsistencies in this claim. Political activists on the app trying to bring attention to issues such as the brutal conditions of Uyghur Muslim internment camps, Tibetan independence, and the atrocities of Tiananmen Square in 1989 have called out TikTok for vehement censorship. The content is either marked as violating community guidelines or kept from being shared at all, halted by the algorithm that defines people’s feeds. This is all officially proclaimed under the guise of “minimising conflict” and moderating dialogue between ethnic and political groups, but suspiciously has only managed to hide anything stated on the foreign policy goals of the Chinese government.
The way in which Tik Tok has done with politics and ideology what a myriad of platforms have been doing with the West (specifically the United States government) for far longer is definitively in and of itself a game changer. Though the playing ground might not currently be even, the situation has proved that perhaps the concern of those competing against China in the political arena is not necessarily one of merely collecting information but of having the possibility of reaching out to individuals on a more personal level and, through entertainment, granting Beijing the possibility to discreetly promote its own agenda. President Trump recently became the first world leader to take action on the app, signing an executive order that places a an on transactions with Bytedance as of mid-September this year. The global community, US allies in particular, are still broadly undecided on their response to the move, with some continuing to defend it and rumours of a new TikTok HQ in London being apparently back on the cards after the firm threatened to walk away. Politically, however, it is being increasingly argued that banning TikTok halts the probability of any kind of expansion of the Chinese sphere of influence, damaging Beijing’s chance of becoming a true hegemon to rival the U.S.’s hyperpower status.
Banner image courtesy of The People’s Republic of China via WIkimedia, © 2020, some rights reserved.
