TikTok: unpleasant truth or blissful ignorance?

During last week's CogX conference, Martin Sorrell, the Executive Chairman of S4 Capital and former CEO of WPP, spoke about TikTok making the prediction “that Bytedance will officially position TikTok outside of China to ensure future growth since navigating US and China relations will be extremely difficult.” Noting that this would be TikTok's greatest challenge for global growth and speculating that it’s global HQ could be in New York, or more likely, in Los Angeles (in the neighborhood with Snap) where close proximity to Hollywood could help fuel adoption among key influencers in their target demographic. With talks circulating as early as  late last year in the press regarding a non-China HQ, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. 

I agree with Martin Sorrell, but believe that TikTok not only has to do this to avoid an ‘official’ reprimand, but convince consumers that they are ‘independent’ of bias related to their parent company. U.S. based platforms have come under fire not only for a lack of policing content in their backyard, but for unsavory affiliations, government agency contracts, and pandering to varying political groups. Should we hold all platforms, whether foreign or domestic accountable in this sense? ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, is closely linked to state agencies in China and is involved in joint ventures with the state, which is quite normal for tech companies in the country. But will that jive with Western consumer sentiment?  As products and brands become more aligned with consumers' social and political sentiments, where does TikTok stand? 

In my 2017 China Field Report on Innovation I predicted that Chinese platforms would soon set their sites out of China and make a big splash in the West.  Even then, China’s pioneering digital innovations were no longer ‘copycats’ of those in the West and I predicted “when China’s home market becomes oversaturated they will go global, with a serious push.” Initially, I had thought this would be a spin-off of WeChat, but they missed their chance when ByteDance acquired Musica.ly later that same year and rebranded to TikTok. The rest, as they say, is history, and based on a recent study, kids spend nearly as much time watching TikTok as YouTube in the US, UK and Spain. The role of such platforms in our daily lives can’t be overlooked, and we therefore need to ask searching questions of their motives.