The United States is facing fierce competition from China in various fields, including the automotive industry, where Chinese production has nearly tripled that of the U.S., along with thousands of other industries, extending to advanced ones such as memory chips, advanced internet generations, and Huawei technologies. The issue of "TikTok" has resurfaced, known worldwide as an application for viewing short videos since 2016, characterized by its high quality, sound effects, and ability to create addiction, which has gained it immense popularity and turned it into a significant source of entertainment and revenue for advertisers. Users aged 18 to 24 account for 36% of the app users, with children averaging 75 minutes of daily usage. Just in February alone, the app was downloaded over 4.7 billion times, with revenues exceeding $16 billion for 2023.
Like other social media platforms, TikTok has been the target of ongoing concerns regarding the misuse of private information collected about its users, especially given that its parent company is Chinese. This and other reasons have led many countries, including India, Bangladesh, and Indonesia, to block its usage within their borders.
Starting in July 2020, then-President Donald Trump launched a strong attack on TikTok, threatening to ban it from the United States on the grounds that the Chinese Communist Party could use the data collected about its users to spy on American citizens. He demanded that TikTok be sold to American interests to eliminate the threat.
Despite various attempts by American investors to purchase the company or a share of it, all efforts have failed, leaving TikTok's future uncertain in both the United States and the European Union. American legislators have made several unsuccessful attempts to completely ban the app due to its popularity and the strong lobbying efforts by its parent company, ByteDance, which is valued at $120 billion.
The most serious accusations against the company relate to the potential for the Chinese government to access data on American users and to influence them through the app's "For You" feature. This is especially concerning as the "For You" algorithm remains opaque and unknown to Americans, raising the possibility of it being exploited to affect or manipulate user behavior and potentially convey political messages, or even interfere in U.S. elections.
This discussion follows the recent approval by the U.S. House of Representatives of a bill aiming to ban the social media app TikTok if it is not separated from its Chinese parent company. The fate of the bill in the Senate remains unclear. The law requires the parent company to sell TikTok within 180 days, and if it does not comply, the app will be banned in American app stores and its web hosting services will be blocked in the United States.
