TikTok has been in the news this week for several reasons, including the fact their CEO was in Washington, D.C., being grilled by U.S. leaders as a groundswell of support is building to ban the popular app in the United States. A Chinese company owns the app, and the data they collect on Americans is being leveraged by the Communist party there. Here’s the most bizarre fact about TikTok — it’s not available for Chinese people to use in their country.
It’s not accessible there and never has been. They have some other person of it called Douyin and ByteDance owns both. But the similarities pretty much end there.
Six hundred million Chinese citizens use the app every day. Many became addicted to it over a decade ago thanks to the crafty creation of founder Zhang Yiming, who designed the app to send customized news feeds to each user. That resulted in users spending over an hour a day on it.
In 2017 the company purchased Musicly (remember that one?) and moved those users to TikTok in 2018.
The Chinese version is a bit of a menace to citizens there too, but for different reasons. A CNN story describes how women there are getting plastic surgery at a ridiculously high level. Why? Because automatic filters make women appear to have high cheekbones, large eyes, and dewy skin — the look women desire there, millions get surgery to attain that look for real.
The CNN story said another big difference is the online shopping done on the Chinese version. Last summer, over 460 million users were live-streaming e-commerce. That’s over 100 million more people than live in America.
And, of course, there’s one other major thing that differentiates the two platforms — a massive amount of censorship.
And here’s one final thing to think about considering the fuss over TikTok – of the top 10 apps on Apple’s app store, four are from China.
Add comment