Banning TikTok

In an earlier blog, I went over the history of TikTok. If all the app does is show you short videos of the kind you like, why is it suddenly in the cross-hairs of the Indian and American governments?

 

First off, pretty much every app tracks your whereabouts, collects data and who knows what else on your phone. We don’t worry too much about that when the app is by a company with no great skills at mining large data or proven machine learning capabilities. But when the algorithm is as great as TikTok’s, it makes people (and increasingly governments) wonder what other algorithms the company may be using… Or as Eugene Wei puts it:

“I like to say that “when you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.”

 

Ok, but don’t Facebook and Google do the same with data, “vacuuming up as much as it can”? Why pick only the Chinese app? Yes, but that’s where the image of the US and China differ, writes Ben Thompson:

“All Chinese Internet companies are compelled by the country’s National Intelligence Law to turn over any and all data that the government demands, and that power is not limited by China’s borders. Moreover, this requisition of data is not subject to warrants or courts, as is the case with U.S. government requests for data from Facebook or any other entity.”

 

On top of that, TikTok inevitably (has to?) censor certain kinds of videos. Like anything on Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, Hong Kong protests… you get the idea. Which leads us to the other side of the censorship coin:

“The point, though, is not just censorship, but its inverse: propaganda. TikTok’s algorithm, unmoored from the constraints of your social network or professional content creators, is free to promote whatever videos it likes, without anyone knowing the difference. TikTok could promote a particular candidate or a particular issue in a particular geography.”

 

Plus, of course, there’s geopolitics involved. India had to do something post-Galwan. Boycotting physical goods from China is, obviously, not a practical option for any country. But banning an app, especially one that makes money for a Chinese company, was a one-sided salvo at China. The Chinese company suddenly lost 200 million Indian users in the blink of an eye. And what did India lose? An app that was entertaining at worst...

 

India banning TikTok set the dominos to start falling. The US, long findings its own Internet companies banned in China (from Google to Facebook), decided to copy the India-playbook and g0 after TikTok. Trump has now pretty much forced TikTok’s parent company to sell of its American operations (the alternative was to be banned in the US).

 

And India, in turn, seems to have turned and copied the American move: rumours are that TikTok’s India operations will also have to be sold off, and bidders include Reliance Jio. Why? Because the longer TikTok stays banned in India, the longer the window for another company, be it Gaana or Facebook, to fill that vacuum.

 

In the bigger scheme of things, are we now going to see an increase in tit-for-tat bans on the Internet? Since China bans American Internet giants, will America now ban more and more of Chinese Internet companies? And as China’s domestic market saturates for its home-grown Internet companies, will an Indian ban on Chinese apps mean a massive market “lost” to American and Indian companies (think Uber and Ola, Amazon and Flipkart)?

 

Has India found its best non-military weapon to hurt China without hurting itself – access to India’s ever-increasing Internet market?