{"id":49528,"date":"2019-08-01T14:45:40","date_gmt":"2019-08-01T04:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=49528"},"modified":"2019-08-01T14:45:40","modified_gmt":"2019-08-01T04:45:40","slug":"the-clocks-ticking-for-regulators-on-tiktok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/the-clocks-ticking-for-regulators-on-tiktok\/","title":{"rendered":"The clock\u2019s ticking for regulators on TikTok"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the 18 months the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was busily working away on its 623-page opus on digital platforms<\/a>, Chinese-owned app upstart TikTok grew a global audience of over 700 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With no serious regulatory barriers\u2014let alone a Great American Firewall\u2014to stop it, TikTok achieved its meteoric growth, ironically enough, by ploughing US$1 billion into ads on the social platforms of its Western rivals<\/a> like Facebook, Facebook-owned Instagram, and Snapchat.<\/p>\n

As the ACCC scribes reached the halfway point of their report, Beijing-based ByteDance\u2014the company behind TikTok\u2014became the world’s most valuable start-up on the planet after securing a US$3 billion investment round which gave it a jaw-dropping valuation of US$75 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then, just over a week before ACCC Chairman Rod Sims handed the finished report to Treasurer Josh Frydenburg, ByteDance announced at the Shanghai Film Festival that it had amassed more than one billion active users<\/a> across its family of apps.<\/p>\n

The overnight success of TikTok should serve as a reminder to the ACCC that, as journalism professor Margaret Simons flagged in her submission to the inquiry<\/a>, regulators \u2018should not assume that Western digital platforms will be the only ones to gain a foothold in Australia\u2019.<\/p>\n

Despite the warning, TikTok gets just a single mention in the report\u2014and only because Facebook listed it as one of its many competitors in an answer to the inquiry. Tencent-operated WeChat gets a paragraph, but with no analysis\u2014despite being used by over a million Australians<\/a> and having a trail<\/a> of<\/a> problematic<\/a> stories <\/a>behind<\/a> it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To be sure, TikTok is still very much a B player in Australia and\u2014at the moment at least\u2014is only a video-sharing app for tweens that you, as a reader of The Strategist<\/em>, have probably never heard of (which, by the way, is completely by design<\/a>).<\/p>\n

But ByteDance executives are reportedly considering opening an Australian office<\/a>. They have already been scouting the local market for content creators<\/a> and, according to market research group Forrester, the company is already pulling in<\/a> anywhere from $3.7 million to $12.9 million in Australia.<\/p>\n

The speedy rise of TikTok should serve as a wake-up call to regulators. We may be most familiar with Silicon Valley\u2019s tech behemoths like Facebook and Google, but there\u2019s a fresh blessing of Chinese unicorns<\/a> galloping our way.<\/p>\n

Unlike China\u2019s first generation of social media tech giants who stumbled in their international expansion<\/a>, second-generation upstarts like ByteDance are proving to be much more sure-footed. What we don\u2019t know is where they\u2019ll pirouette to next.<\/p>\n

There are already signs<\/a> that the suite of mini-programs in the TikTok app is going to expand. Similar, seemingly inane Western apps like Snapchat have already branched out to news publishing<\/a> and certainly ByteDance will be looking to do the same.<\/p>\n

After all, news is a core competency for ByteDance. The company\u2019s main app inside China is the news aggregator Jinri Toutiao <\/em>(\u2018Today\u2019s Headlines\u2019) and it has already significantly disrupted the news business there.<\/p>\n

It also offended the ruling Chinese Communist Party in the process. In April last year, the company was ordered to suspend Jinri Toutiao <\/em>after the authorities decided<\/a> the news stories featured on it were \u2018opposed to morality\u2019.<\/p>\n

That prompted ByteDance CEO Zhang Yiming to pledge to increase his team of censors from 6,000 to 10,000\u2014the job ads for which noted that candidates with \u2018strong political sensitivity\u2019 would be preferred<\/a>\u2014as well as pour even more resources into developing an AI-powered automated censorship apparatus.<\/p>\n

TikTok has already attracted the ire of regulators around the world, including in Indonesia<\/a>, India<\/a>, the UK<\/a> and the US<\/a>, where the company has accepted a US$5.7 million settlement with the Federal Trade Commission for violating the Children\u2019s Online Privacy Protection Act.<\/p>\n

But beyond the expected regulatory missteps of a fast-growing social media platform, TikTok is uniquely susceptible to other problems that come from its ineluctable closeness to the censorship and surveillance apparatus of the CCP-led state.<\/p>\n

Beijing has demonstrated a propensity<\/a> for controlling and shaping overseas Chinese-language media. The speedy growth of TikTok now puts the CCP in a position where it can attempt to do the same on a largely non-Chinese-speaking platform\u2014with the help of an AI-powered advanced algorithm<\/a>. There\u2019s evidence to suggest<\/a> politically motivated censorship is already happening.<\/p>\n

Australia\u2019s regulators may think they have a gargantuan task ahead of them grappling with America\u2019s tech behemoths, but they will face a whole new order of problems when they try to rein in the Chinese tech unicorns that are inextricably linked to the CCP\u2019s opaque and erratic censorship and surveillance regime.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 18 months the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission was busily working away on its 623-page opus on digital platforms, Chinese-owned app upstart TikTok grew a global audience of over 700 million. 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