While techbros are often seen fighting off one another for social media dominance, a case in point being Mark Zuckerberg with Threads against Elon Musk’s X, seldom does it happen that an app meant to connect people becomes sore to the eyes for more countries than one. That’s the TikTok story, the
Chinese social media behemoth, which, in less than a decade, has risen to global dominance, having teenagers and young adults hooked and their governments worried over impacts both on mental health and national security.
While India was the first one, banning the massively popular short-form video-sharing app at the stroke of a pen in June 2020 as the armies of the two nations faced off one another in Ladakh, the United States is now moving forward taking steps in a similar direction.
In a bill passed in the US House of Representatives with bipartisan support last month, the country has called for TikTok’s China-based parent firm ByteDance to divest from the company or be booted out of the country.
Notably, India was the biggest market for TikTok then, and the United States is the biggest now, with a whopping 143.4 million unique monthly users, as of January 2024.
While India and China were embroiled in an actual conflict along their borders, the United States and China are engaged in a tussle for economic dominance. However, India had then said that the move to ban TikTok along with several other Chinese apps was a matter of “data security and safeguarding the privacy” of Indians from “elements hostile to national security and defence of India.”
Meanwhile, the US legislators argue that TikTok would allow China access to the data of Americans and could be used to influence its citizens through the social platform.
While TikTok has repeatedly denied the argument and links to the Chinese government, several other countries and organisations, too, have undertaken similar steps.
For example, the European Union has banned TikTok on its staff’s devices. Canada, which, too, has tense relations with China, too, has banned TikTok from government-issued devices citing risks to privacy
and security. Other nations that have taken similar steps include Australia and Taiwan.
Meanwhile, Pakistan banned the app four times over 15 months till November 2021, over “immoral, obscene and vulgar” content. The app is currently active in the country. Nepal is another nation in South
Asia to have completely banned the app, citing it to be “detrimental to social harmony”.
Tiktoktisation of social media
TikTok might be banned in some nations and restricted in some other, but that hasn’t put a dent in its relevance, given that multiple social media platforms have gone fast to launch TikTok-like features.
Soon after India banned TikTok, Instagram launched Reels and YouTube came up with Shorts, which continue to be the apps’ biggest sellers, and the companies continue to give much emphasis on these. Recently, Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, too, started testing TikTok-like short-form videos on its platform. Post the India ban, a number of homegrown short video apps, such as Josh, Chingari, and Moj, filled the TikTok void.
Apart from the format, the vertical video feature, along with the scrollable feed, has also been adopted by multiple big and small social media platforms. The Discovery feed, which allows users to consume content by creators other than whom they follow is another classic TikTok feature that has been emulated by the likes of Instagram, YouTube, etc. Not only social media companies, but even Netflix has experimented with the vertically shot scrollable short-form video feature with Fast Laughs.
The users’ verdict
In the end, it all boils down to what resonates with the users. While Facebook and its sister apps — Instagram and WhatsApp — along with YouTube continue to be among the top performers, TikTok, which came out much later than the other four, follows them swiftly with over 1.5 billion monthly active users, as per Statista. That number is expected to reach 1.8 billion by the end of 2024, as per reports.
Meanwhile, TikTok generated an estimated revenue of $14.3 billion last year, clocking a year-on-year rise of a whopping 52%.
All of this underlines TikTok’s dominance that is hard to challenge both in the tech and non-tech space.
