I should mention that I was an early user of the app, downloading it right after it became available. ByteDance is spending millions on lobbying, yes, but Chew is also ramping up his charm offensive, making TikToks on his own account encouraging users to tell everyone about how much they love the app. ![]() And Chew’s newest strategy seems to be taking his stump speech on the road, virtually and IRL. ![]() ![]() TikTok’s true competition, then, is the politics of each territory in which it operates. YouTube is a good place to post videos, but not to make them TikTok not only lets you post videos, but its in-house editing app rivals expensive pro-level software.Īn entire culture is rising up of users to whom it doesn’t occur to leave the app for, well, anything. With TikTok, it’s already here-no headset required. Meta has promised a metaverse where we create, work, shop, and play. X is chasing away advertisers TikTok integrates them. It outclasses every other app in this regard. The company has less control over the third issue: It is hard to imagine that the app will ever be “non-Chinese” enough for, say, the governor of Montana, whose reason for banning TikTok in the state was to “protect Montanans’ personal and private data from the Chinese Communist Party.” (A federal judge has since temporarily blocked the ban.)īut let’s be clear: TikTok is no longer in competition with other social media companies, especially if your metric of success is immersion. At best, Chew's promise has been slow to deliver in full. TikTok has made a show of addressing the first two issues: During the hearings, anyone listening heard Chew promise to move all of its US data to US-based servers, though some TikTok employees say that some US data is still being shared with their parent company. And third, that thinly veiled anti-Chinese xenophobia has become a reliable part of the US political playbook. Second, that people have been handing over increasing amounts of data for years, including to companies like Uber and Facebook (both of which have also reportedly tracked journalists), and any company collecting so much user data should be heavily scrutinized. Three things can simultaneously be true: First, that China’s government openly watches its citizens and an app with origins there will naturally raise a red flag in many countries, especially in the US after parent company ByteDance was caught tracking journalists there in late 2022. This is a bit over-the-top, but the sentiment can’t be wholly dismissed. They had the attitude of ‘You’re a Chinese spy, and we’re gonna beat the shit out of you.’” “It was a circus,” a TikTok employee tells me, speaking under condition of anonymity. Instead, Chew’s introduction to the wider public took place during a barrage of questions at a congressional hearing in Washington, DC, last March. ![]() When he stepped in as TikTok’s CEO in mid-2021, there was little fanfare the official account didn’t even make a TikTok about it. I’m also here because it seems like Chew never really got to introduce himself on his own terms. The whole festival will be streamed exclusively on the app, for free (highlights would later air on Disney+ and Hulu) it’s the digits on the top left of everyone’s phone screen tonight that will be the ultimate metric of success or failure for this event. The location makes no sense until you realize that for TikTok, location doesn’t matter. Read more deep, weird, smart conversations with the most important people in our world.
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