Concerns have focused on allegations the tech could prove to be a national security threat, or that the Chinese state may be seeking to peddle influence or gather intelligence and data, even though it does not own the app itself or its parent company.
So what exactly is the app, who owns it, and who is suspicious about its motives?
What is TikTok?
TikTok is a video-sharing app, that lets users upload footage on any topic they wish. Many of the clips feature music and can be slowed down or sped up to produce different effects. Popular accounts post jokes, pranks, or stunts.
Originally, the clips had to be just 15 seconds long, but users can now post videos of up to 10 minutes.
The Chinese version of the app, Douyin, was launched in China in 2016, with the international version TikTok launched the following year.
Then a $1 billion merger with another video-sharing site called Musical.ly in 2018 made it available globally and it has grown exponentially since then to become the fourth most popular social media platform after Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
How Many Users Does TikTok Have Around the World?
TikTok has more than two billion users.
According to data compiled by statistics site Statista, the U.S. made up the largest base of TikTok users as of April 2022, with some 136.5 million Americans engaging with the app. Indonesia had the second-largest audience with around 99 million TikTok users, while Brazil came in third with 74 million users.
Although TikTok is Chinese-owned, it is not available in China. Instead, an almost identical sister app called Douyin, owned by the same company, is used there and has more than 300 million users, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.
Who Owns TikTok?
TikTok is owned by its Chinese parent company ByteDance, which is based in Beijing. However, the company is not actually registered in China, but is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
Although ByteDance and TikTok both have offices in China, neither is owned by the ruling Communist party and both insist they are not controlled by the government.
TikTok has offices around the world, with its largest in Los Angeles, California, but whistleblower ex-employees told CNBC that ByteDance was heavily involved in the day-to-day running of the firm, to the extent that American employees had email addresses for both companies.
In November last year, the chair of ByteDance—the company’s co-founder Zhang Yiming—stepped down; a move the Guardian said came as the Chinese government tightened its control of China’s tech sector and ramped up pressure on its entrepreneur bosses to support the party line.
ByteDance created a new unit in May this year called the Beijing Douyin Information Service Ltd to run Douyin—the Chinese version of TikTok—and the company has admitted that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) does indeed own a share of that business.
But the company tweeted that claims ByteDance itself is owned by the CCP “is mistaken… a Chinese state-owned enterprise has a 1% stake in a different ByteDance subsidiary called Beijing Douyin Information Service Limited, not in TikTok’s parent company.”
What Are the Concerns About China’s Influence Through TikTok?
Leaked internal documents seen by the Guardian in September 2019 showed that TikTok moderators were told to censor videos that mentioned Tiananmen Square and Tibetan independence—topics considered sensitive to Chinese authorities. It sparked fears the state could push its own worldview outside of its own borders.
But a ByteDance spokesperson told the British newspaper: “In TikTok’s early days we took a blunt approach to minimising conflict on the platform… As TikTok began to take off globally last year, we recognised that this was not the correct approach… The old guidelines in question are outdated and no longer in use. Today we take localised approaches, including local moderators, local content and moderation policies, local refinement of global policies, and more.”
Besides censorship, TikTok critics fear that the site could gather private data, which could be used to target individuals and influence them in some way, such as during election campaigns.
In August, the U.K. Parliament deleted its own TikTok account, just days after its launch, when lawmakers raised concerns about the potential security risks of data being passed to the Chinese government. A TikTok spokesperson told the BBC it was “disappointing” that Parliament would no longer connect with users, adding that the company would be happy to clear up “any inaccuracies about our platform.”
Meanwhile, India actually banned TikTok altogether—along with more than 50 other Chinese-owned apps back in 2020—with an Indian government spokesperson saying the sites were outlawed because “they are engaged in activities which [are] prejudicial to [the] sovereignty and integrity of India, defense of India, security of state and public order.”
TikTok denied the allegations and the head of TikTok in India, Nikhil Gandhi, released a statement challenging the ruling, saying: “TikTok continues to comply with all data privacy and security requirements under Indian law and has not shared any information of our users in India with any foreign government, including the Chinese government.”
Before the ban, India had represented the app’s largest user base, with more than 611 million of TikTok’s over 2 billion users, according to India Today.
But the U.K. and India are not the only countries concerned about TikTok.
In 2020, then-President Donald Trump also flirted with the idea of banning TikTok, citing security fears. But despite threatening to outlaw the site, ultimately that never happened.
However, U.S. officials’ concerns remain undiminished and the flames were fanned in June this year, when leaked audio of internal TikTok meetings revealed that Americans’ data had been repeatedly accessed by Chinese ByteDance employees, according to a Buzzfeed report.
The following month, TikTok said it had rejected an attempt by the Chinese government to open a secret account on the platform for the purpose of spreading propaganda, claiming the incident proved its independence.
Nevertheless, U.S. senators quizzed TikTok Chief Operating Officer Vanessa Pappas about the firm’s ties to Chinese government officials during a hearing last month.
Pappas admitted that Chinese employees do have access to U.S. users’ data. But she insisted TikTok would not pass this sensitive information to China, although she avoided stating whether TikTok’s owner ByteDance could be compelled to hand over American data to the Chinese government.
Sen. Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, then asked Pappas to commit TikTok to “cutting off all data and metadata flows to China,” but Pappas would not be drawn on that explicitly and instead promised that “our final agreement with the U.S. government will satisfy all national security concerns.”
TikTok moved its U.S. users’ information to new servers at Oracle Corp in a move that could address American concerns over data protection, the company confirmed to Reuters in June.
The New York Times reported last month that the Biden administration and TikTok have hammered out the foundations of a deal in which TikTok would make changes to its data security and governance without ByteDance being required to sell it.
What Do Analysts Say?
The information collected by TikTok is similar to what’s already gathered by other social media sites, according to security researcher Patrick Jackson. The chief technology officer of a security app called Disconnect says that Facebook’s scale in the worldwide market make it a far more concerning entity than TikTok.
“The sheer volume of what’s collected can’t be compared [to TikTok],” he told USA Today. And referring to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where users’ Facebook data was accessed by political campaigns, he added: “What’s bigger than using your data to influence an election?” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, now head of parent company Meta, addressed the scandal in 2018, vowing that users’ data would be protected in future.
But Michael Lammbrau, the managing director of cyber security company Internet 2.0 USA and a former professor in intelligence, described TikTok as a “Trojan horse,” referring to the legend about an enemy that hid inside a gift in order to safely pass through a city’s defenses.
He told Newsweek in August: “If the U.S. government, as a matter of national security, does not ban TikTok from the U.S. market and U.S. devices, the United States Department of Defense and other U.S. departments need to pick up where it left off and ban the use of TikTok on government and personal devices. TikTok is proving itself to be more than an application.
“TikTok has the capability for surveillance and influence line-of-effort funded and supported by the Chinese government (and its friends). If U.S. leadership is concerned with influence operations, botnets, misinformation and disinformation campaigns by other foreign governments, why wouldn’t they remove the Trojan horse that can allow an enemy in the front door?”
TikTok has always denied links to the Chinese government and has said users’ data is safe.
A TikTok spokesperson told Newsweek: “The TikTok service is offered in many countries around the world, but it is not available for download in China. We are committed to operating transparently, and we are always open to listening to and working with policy stakeholders to explain our approach to data governance.”
