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TikTok

Website:

www.tiktok.com/en/
Type:

For-Profit Social-Media Platform
Parent Company:

ByteDance
Formation:

2016 (Douyin version)
2018 (International version)
CEO (May 2021-Present):

Shou Zi Chew

Contact InfluenceWatch with suggested edits or tips for additional profiles.

TikTok is a social-media service owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. 1 2 It is known for its short-form video format and popularity. As of March 2023, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew claimed that the platform had 150 million U.S. users. 3 Information technology service-management and web-ranking company Cloudflare listed TikTok as the number-one most-popular domain on the internet in late 2021, surpassing Google. 4

TikTok and parent company ByteDance have been subjected to controversy regarding their ties to the Chinese government’s ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). 5 6

Background

TikTok is a social media and video-hosting service owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance. 7 8 Its Chinese counterpart and original version, Douyin, was launched in China in September 2016 as “A.me” before being rebranded as Douyin. It was conceived as an app to make music videos, but quickly became a platform for any category of short video. 9

TikTok is the international version of Douyin, and but the two apps do not have any access to each other’s content. Although TikTok and Douyin share much of their source code, Douyin has special back-door censorship features, which TikTok does not contain. Douyin restricts certain political terms in its search function, which TikTok allegedly does not do. TikTok was officially created in August 2018 when ByteDance merged Musical.ly (released January 1, 2017) and Trill into one app with the name “TikTok.” 10

TikTok is known for its short-form video format, though videos up to 10 minutes in length became available in February 2022. 11 12 Commentators have noted the ways TikTok has transformed cultural trends, entertainment, the music industry, celebrity culture and how young people become famous, corporate marketing, and popularized niche interests. 13

In 2021, the web-performance tracking company Cloudflare reported that TikTok had become the most-popular domain on the internet, surpassing Google, and the most-popular social-media domain, surpassing Facebook. 14 15 In 2022, Cloudflare reported that Google was the number-one service on the internet with TikTok tied for the number-three spot with Apple. 16

Chinese Government Espionage

U.S. lawmakers have had concerns over TikTok’s handling of user data because Chinese companies must obey the authoritarian dictates of the Chinese Communist Party and allegedly must have a perpetual backdoor policy. 17 18 Through strict regulations, the CCP requires Chinese companies to establish CCP branches within them, many company executives are members of the CCP, and companies are compelled to accept Chinese state-backed investments. 19

Under Xi Jinping, China has backed away from its late twentieth and early twenty-first century market reforms and embraced its communist roots as a country that forces its companies and firms to conform to the political edicts of the CCP. 20 In 2017, China passed a law that stated “any organization and citizen” shall “support and cooperate in national intelligence work,” which has been cited by U.S. officials to support their case that Chinese company Huawei had spied on the U.S. and its allies. 21 22 In summer 2021, the Chinese government issued a series of crackdowns on Chinese companies, especially tech companies, justifying these moves with rhetoric of “common prosperity.” 23

TikTok has publicly denied that its connections to the Chinese government could pose a security threat to other nations. 24 TikTok has claimed, in reference to American users, that their user data gathered by the company is stored in the United States rather than China. A TikTok executive told U.S. lawmakers in sworn testimony during an October 2021 Senate hearing that its “world-renowned, US-based security team” has complete control over who has access to user data. 25 26

2022 Leaked TikTok Employee Audio

However, leaked audio from more than 80 internal TikTok meetings revealed that China-based ByteDance employees have accessed private user data from U.S. users repeatedly. In June 2022, Buzzfeed News reported on 14 leaked statements from nine different TikTok employees that suggested Chinese engineers had access to U.S. user data at least between the months of September 2021 and January 2022, if not far longer. U.S. TikTok employees had to ask Chinese employees about data flow, as the U.S. staff did not have permission or training about how to access such data on their own. Furthermore, one member of TikTok’s Trust and Safety Department had been recorded as saying “Everything is seen in China,” and another official as saying a Beijing-based “Master Admin” “has access to everything” in September 2021 meetings. 27

In response to the June 2022 leak, TikTok spokesperson Maureen Shanahan told BuzzFeed: “We know we’re among the most scrutinized platforms from a security standpoint, and we aim to remove any doubt about the security of US user data. That’s why we hire experts in their fields, continually work to validate our security standards, and bring in reputable, independent third parties to test our defenses.” 28

TikTok announced that it had been working with the American software company Oracle for more than a year to “better safeguard our app, systems, and the security of US user data.” As of June 2022, all U.S. user traffic was allegedly being routed through Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure, and TikTok claimed it was going to delete U.S. user data from its data centers in the U.S. and Singapore. The platform also claimed it had created a new internal department with “U.S.-based leadership” to manage U.S. user data. 29

The June 2020 audio leaks had come from a series of meetings held by TikTok as part of something called Project Texas, which was conceived specifically to curtail its sharing of U.S. user data with Chinese employees in order to assuage the U.S. government’s concerns that the app posed a national -ecurity threat. TikTok planned to use the agreements from Project Texas to establish its privacy policy model in Europe. 30

2023 Lawsuit by Ex-ByteDance Executive

In May 2023, former head of engineering for ByteDance’s U.S offices Yintao Yu filed a wrongful dismissal lawsuit in the San Francisco Superior Court against ByteDance claiming that the company had terminated his employment after he raised concerns of “illegal conduct.” 31 According to Yu, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had a “special office…sometimes referred to the “Committee”” 32 within ByteDance that guided, “how the company advanced core Communist values,” 33 though also claiming that the Committee did not work for ByteDance. 34 In addition, Yu’s lawsuit also claimed that the CCP had access to U.S user data through a , “backdoor channel in the code.” 35 Yu’s lawsuit continued by claiming the CCP promoted, “nationalistic content [that] served to both increase engagement on ByteDance’s websites and to promote support of the CCP.” 36 It also made claims that ByteDance would be “responsive” 37to CCP requests that would “elevate or remove” content. 38Yu even claimed that ByteDance had removed content from other social media platforms such as SnapChat and Instagram without permission while reposting that content under their own platform under fake accounts. 39

A statement from ByteDance responded to Yu’s lawsuit by commenting, “We plan to vigorously oppose what we believe are baseless claims and allegations in this complaint.”  40 Referring to specific accusations within the lawsuit, the statement continued that Yu had only worked for the company until July 2018 and on a discontinued app called Flipgram. In response to Yu’s claims that the company had deleted content on competitors’ websites while posting it on their own, the statement continued that ByteDance, ” “is committed to respecting the intellectual property of other companies” 41 while it obtains data for their sites, “in accordance with industry practices and our global policy.” 42

Government Bans

Countries Other Than the U.S.

In 2020, India banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese-owned apps (including messaging service WeChat) nationwide, citing privacy concerns. India gave the companies a window of time to address its concerns, but ultimately made the ban permanent in January 2021. 43

Pakistan has banned the app for violating the country’s standards of content moderation on at least four occasions. 44

Afghanistan’s Taliban leadership banned TikTok in 2022 to protect young people from “being misled.” 45

As of March 2023, Belgium, Britain and its parliament, Canada, Denmark, the executive arm of the European Union (EU), France, the Norwegian parliament, the New Zealand parliament, and Taiwan had banned the app from official and government-issued devices citing security concerns. 46 47 48

In March 2023, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) banned TikTok on all staff devices, citing security concerns. 49

The United States

The Trump administration intended to ban the app, but was blocked from doing so by a ruling made by Judge Carl Nichols in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in September 2020. 50 In his executive order, then-President Donald Trump alleged that TikTok’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information.” 51

In response to Trump’s executive order, TikTok released an official company statement on August 7, 2020, claiming to be “shocked” by the order’s lack of “any due process” and criticizing how the Trump administration allegedly “paid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement without going through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itself into negotiations between private businesses.” TikTok defended itself and commended the American legal and business environment “as a magnet for investment and spurred decades of American economic growth” and said Trump’s order “set a dangerous precedent for the concept of free expression and open markets.” TikTok claimed it had never shared user data with the Chinese government, nor censored content on its platform at the request of the Chinese government. 52

On February 27, 2023, the Biden administration told federal agencies that they had 30 days to delete TikTok from all government devices. 53

On March 1, 2023, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee voted to advance legislation that would allow President Joseph Biden to ban TikTok nationwide, which at the time was being used by more than 100 million Americans (according to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, the number was 150 million). 54 The bill, known as the Deterring America’s Technological Adversaries (DATA) Act, would end a precedent of protecting creative digital content from being subject to U.S. sanctions. 55

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on February 27, 2023, in opposition to the DATA Act, arguing that its additional provisions would threaten rights guaranteed by the First Amendment. 56

A Senate bill known as the “RESTRICT Act” that would enable the federal government to restrict TikTok and possibly other Chinese companies and products was introduced on March 7, 2023. “It’s safe to assume that if the [Chinese Communist Party] is willing to lie about its spy balloon and cover up the origins of the worst pandemic in 100 years, they’ll lie about using Tiktok [sic] to spy on American citizens,” Sen. John Thune (R-SD) said to reporters at a press conference. 57

Later that month, the Biden White House called on TikTok’s parent company ByteDance to sell the platform or be at risk of a total ban on the platform in the United States by Congress due to national-security concerns. On March 23, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testified in a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing on the platform’s consumer-privacy practices, data-security practices, and its impact on children. Lawmakers scrutinized the CEO regarding TikTok’s alleged data-harvesting practices and its relation to the state government of China. 58

Lobbying Efforts

In response to the increasing desire among politicians to ban the platform, TikTok took to hiring lobbying consultants to persuade members of congress not to vote in favor of the ban. 59 From 2019 to March 2023, TikTok and parent company ByteDance spent more than $13 million lobbying federal government officials. 60

According to Luke Goldstein in the left-wing American Prospect, some Democratic lawmakers were more hesitant to agree to ban the platform due to the app’s popularity among young potential voters and because they successfully used the app to propagate political content during the 2022 midterms. To convince uncertain lawmakers, TikTok hired the powerful consulting firm SKDKnickerbocker (SKDK) to guide the process. 61

SKDK’s past clients have included the highest ranks of the Democratic political establishment, such as the former President Barack Obama, the 2020 Biden presidential campaign, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D), and former New York City Mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg. It has also been hired by major American corporations and entities such as AT&T-Time Warner, the Rockefeller Foundation, American Airlines-U.S. Airways, and Live Nation-Ticketmaster. 62 63

SKDK staff have included some of the most-prominent Democratic operatives in the United States, including Senior Adviser to President Biden and former White House Communications Director Anita Dunn, and former Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) spokesman and media strategist Doug Thornell. 64 Anita Dunn and her husband Bob Bauer have been described as “the Couple at the Center of Biden’s Inner Circle” by the New York Times. 65 By working with a firm that had such extensive connections to the Biden administration and Democratic officials, commentators suggested, TikTok was attempting to put pressure on Democrats to dissuade them from going through with the ban. 66

SKDK’s decision to accept TikTok’s contract broke precedent among top D.C. lobbying firms that also work with American Big Tech companies, such as Chamber of Progress and TechNet, which had up until that point refused to work with TikTok out of fear it would upset its deals with Google, Amazon, Facebook, and other competitors. SKDK has a track record of taking on risky clients, such as the Israeli spyware company NSO Group in 2019 after the firm had been sued for spying on journalists. 67

Leadership

In May 2020, head of Disney Plus Kevin Mayer announced he was leaving Disney to become the CEO TikTok and COO of ByteDance. The former CEO of TikTok, Alex Zhu, stepped down to become the vice president of product and strategy at ByteDance. 68 Mayer quit less than four months later amid the Trump administration’s threats against the app and was succeeded by Australian interim executive Vanessa Pappas, who had been working as the general manager of the U.S. branch of TikTok since January 2019. 69 70

In May 2021, Shou Zi Chew was appointed as the new chief executive officer of TikTok. Chew is from Singapore, is based there, and was the CFO of ByteDance. He remained in that role after taking the position at TikTok. 71

References

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  2. Isaac, Mike. “U.S. Appeals Injunction Against TikTok Ban.” New York Times, October 8, 2020. Accessed April 3, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/08/technology/us-appeals-injunction-against-tiktok-ban.html.
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