What is 'TikTok'... Why Has It Become a Battleground Between the US and China in Teenagers' Playground?

Used by Approximately 800 Million People in Over 150 Countries Worldwide

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwon Jaehee] "TikTok is our new competitor" - Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix

TikTok is under intense fire from U.S. companies and the government. The U.S. messenger app Snapchat even listed 'TikTok' as a competitor in a report submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last year.

The Trump administration ordered ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, to sell all assets related to its U.S. business within 90 days and exit the market.

What exactly is 'TikTok' that makes the U.S. so nervous?

Following Huawei, TikTok has become the new target of the U.S. government. Owned by ByteDance, TikTok is an app for sharing 15-second short videos. Unlike YouTube, it allows video creation without professional editing skills and features a simple user interface that lets users shoot vertically without rotating their smartphones, perfectly appealing to Generation Z (young people born from the mid-1990s to early 2000s).

Because the videos are short, they rely less on language, and with the addition of automatic translation features, TikTok quickly spread across borders. Moreover, by acquiring the U.S. lip-sync app Musical.ly for $1 billion in 2017 and absorbing its existing users, TikTok successfully entered the U.S., European, and Southeast Asian markets.

TikTok has about 800 million users across more than 150 countries worldwide. According to app data provider Sensor Tower, TikTok ranked first globally with 620 million downloads in the first half of this year.

The 15-second short videos that attracted users worldwide boast tremendous influence. A representative case is the no-show incident at President Trump's Tulsa rally. It started when a TikTok user posted a video encouraging Black TikTok users, frustrated by the news that President Trump was holding a rally on Juneteenth (June 19, the day commemorating the emancipation of slaves), to take action. Based on AI-driven algorithms, the video rapidly spread among politically interested users in their teens and twenties, who then booked free tickets to the Tulsa rally but did not show up, sending a political message. In fact, among TikTok's U.S. users, there are 26.5 million monthly active users, with 50% being young people aged 16 to 24.

Thus, TikTok has established itself not just as a simple video platform but as an effective marketing tool and distribution channel. This is why the U.S. government does not view TikTok merely as entertainment.

The rapid growth of ByteDance, TikTok's parent company, is also a threatening factor from the U.S. perspective. ByteDance, preparing for a Hong Kong stock market listing, saw its corporate value nearly double from $75 billion (about 89 trillion KRW) at the end of 2018 to $140 billion (about 166 trillion KRW) in 2020. Furthermore, ByteDance, which possesses internet, AI, and data technologies, is entering the Hong Kong financial market and has limitless potential to expand into future industries based on core technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The Trump administration's crackdown on TikTok is not just about killing an entertainment app but about fundamentally blocking access to future technologies that U.S. companies have monopolized.

China is not standing idly by. It has made stopping the crackdown on Chinese companies like Huawei and TikTok a condition for implementing the Phase One trade agreement.

At a briefing on the 13th, Ren Hongbin, Vice Minister of China's Ministry of Commerce, warned, "We need to create conditions for implementing the Phase One trade agreement," and expressed hope that "the U.S. will stop restrictive and discriminatory measures against Chinese companies."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.