Subtitle: The fate for TikTok was written a year ago by China and the US together, and what Trump did was merely make that script more dramatic.
By Afra Wang, Sirui Hua
(Note: This article was originally published in Initium Media on August 13, 2020. A simplified Chinese version and the original page are also available.)
On August 7, 2020, in Washington, amid a cacophony of condemnation and cheers, Trump walked into a campaign rally in Oklahoma. The pandemic had locked down all of America, and this president who loved creating heated spectacles had not held a public rally for a long time. This was the first in months. Though the United States had the world's highest numbers of COVID-19 cases and deaths, making public rallies unwise, people still came waving American flags; some brought their families, children perched on shoulders.
But if the live broadcast cameras had panned to the upper sections of the arena, they would have revealed vast swaths of empty seats—this venue that could hold up to 19,000 people was filled to less than one-third capacity. The New York Times later reported that Trump's rally suffered this defeat because masses of K-Pop fans on TikTok had mobilized to register for large numbers of tickets without intending to attend. Though Trump rally "tickets" were actually unlimited in quantity, meaning TikTok users couldn't prevent real attendees from entering through "fake reservations"—the fact that TikTok users had declared direct "war" on Trump still left his campaign team utterly humiliated.
More than a month later, less than a hundred days before the election, on August 2nd, Trump told the media he would ban TikTok in the United States. Within days, Microsoft issued a statement saying it was in talks with TikTok about acquiring its U.S. business. According to Trump's executive order, Microsoft needed to complete negotiations with ByteDance within 45 days, or TikTok would be banned across America.
But before Trump acted, Washington had already formed a consensus that TikTok "threatened American national security." The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) had launched its investigation of TikTok as early as November 2019. The Pentagon had issued orders banning military personnel from using TikTok in December of the previous year. The Democratic-controlled House had also passed a resolution in July with overwhelming majority support, prohibiting federal employees from downloading TikTok on government-issued devices... The script for TikTok was written a year ago by China and the United States together, and what Trump did was merely make that script more dramatic.
June 20, 2020, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Trump supporters at the "Make America Great Again" campaign rally. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
TikTok swept ahead to become the most popular app among America's "Generation Z" (equivalent to those born after 1995), not only dominating in user numbers and market usage but deeply influencing a generation's popular culture.
In early 2014, Alex Zhu and Yang Luyu founded Musical.ly in Shanghai. Within a few years, this app rapidly gained a foothold in the American teenage market, at one point surpassing Snapchat and Instagram to top the U.S. app store charts. Josh Elman, one of Musical.ly's investors from top Silicon Valley venture firm Greylock Partners, said in 2016 that this company was "the first company headquartered in China, designed in China, yet popular in America," even predicting it would become "the next generation's MTV," transforming the next generation's entertainment consumption habits.
However, Musical.ly simultaneously hit a growth bottleneck. According to Caixin reports, though Musical.ly had over 200 million registered users before its acquisition, monthly active users were only 9 million. In December 2017, ByteDance acquired Musical.ly for $1 billion, and in August of the following year, fully integrated Musical.ly with TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin—this frustrated some old Musical.ly users but allowed TikTok/Musical.ly to break through its bottleneck, expanding beyond its primarily female teenage user base to welcome explosive new growth.
In the following years, ByteDance spent heavily on advertising in overseas markets like Europe and America to acquire new users, suffering losses of $1.2 billion in 2018. Though this expansion strategy faced considerable skepticism at the time, it caught the attention of American competitors: Facebook launched Lasso in November 2018, conducting "pixel-level copying" of TikTok (this app never gained traction, and Facebook ultimately shut down Lasso in July 2020, launching a new imitation product called Reels on Instagram); Snapchat, another social app popular with young people, increased investment in short video consumption and redesigned with greater emphasis on entertainment features; Dom Hofmann, one of the founders of Vine—the short video platform that once swept America but closed due to core user attrition—also launched a new short video platform called Byte.
Yet TikTok still swept ahead, rapidly becoming the most popular app among America's "Generation Z" (equivalent to those born after 1995), not only dominating in user numbers and market usage but deeply influencing a generation's popular culture. 2019 could be called "TikTok Year." When New Year's bells rang in New York's Times Square, TikTok's logo flashed on the adjacent advertising screens. That same year, Atlanta-based Black artist Lil Nas X's "viral hit" "Old Town Road" topped the Billboard pop charts for 19 consecutive weeks, breaking the record Mariah Carey had set 23 years earlier—and this song's popularity came precisely from its viral spread on TikTok.
Before TikTok, Chinese internet companies' "going abroad" products had mainly been tool and gaming apps with no brand presence, concentrated in markets like Southeast Asia and India, with few able to crack the higher-value, more mature European and American markets. Connie Chan, partner at Silicon Valley venture firm a16z, described TikTok as "the first mainstream consumer app whose product is artificial intelligence itself."
Opening TikTok defaults to the recommendation page (#FYP For You Page). TikTok pushed algorithms to their extreme—after browsing just a few short videos, providing feedback through actions like watching, liking, commenting, and sharing, without needing to follow accounts or add friends, the algorithm would work its magic, quickly addicting users. In fact, whether ByteDance's early product Neihan Duanzi, or today's Toutiao and Douyin that have become "super apps" in China, all employed similar algorithmic content distribution logic—this was the core of ByteDance's commercial success.
April 21, 2018, during Fujian's first Digital China Summit, Douyin's promotional booth. Photo: VCG/VCG via Getty Images
TikTok's algorithm was like the Sorting Hat from Harry Potter, dividing users into numerous subcultures while attracting more creators: creators didn't need to spend time accumulating followers—TikTok officially claimed that video performance had no direct relationship to follower count—even new creators with zero followers could garner millions of views and quickly "go viral" if the system deemed their content sufficiently "good."
Through this recommendation algorithm, TikTok and ByteDance broke through cultural barriers and conquered the American tech giants' "backyard." In 2020, when countries worldwide entered lockdown due to the pandemic, TikTok's installation volume surged again. According to mobile app data platform Sensor Tower, TikTok and Douyin's combined installations reached 315 million in a single quarter (Q1 2020), with total installations doubling in less than a year to exceed 2 billion. The United States was the largest market after India and China, with total installations reaching 165 million.