Of the various possible dates for TikTok’s anniversary, the Wall Street Journal chose November 10 to mark this week’s five years of the Chinese platform, with rocket illustration and an oral history of its “stratospheric rise.”
Ten respondents, including celebrity users, US officials and politicians, “tell how TikTok became the most popular app in the world.” How it “exploded into a pop culture phenomenon, worn by two-thirds of American teenagers.”
But also how its “future remains uncertain”, threatened by Washington. “One thing is for sure: the world has never seen anything like TikTok.” According to the New York Times, he is now treated as a competitor by Google even for its search engine.
Donald Trump tried to ban it from the American market two years ago, without success, and everything seemed to be heading for another attempt, with the resumption of Congress by the Republican Party. But the polls, which are still being counted, seem to be getting in the way.
Two Republicans, a senator and a congressman, also published on Thursday (10) in the Washington Post the article “TikTok, time is up. The app should be banned in America”. His argument, without seeking minor excuses, is summarized at the beginning of the text:
“The US is in a new Cold War with the Chinese Communist Party. However, millions of Americans increasingly rely on TikTok, an application exposed to the influence of the PC, to consume news, share content and communicate with friends.”
The article announced the introduction of a bill to “ban TikTok and other US social networks” for overseas links. But it had little repercussion, amid reports predicting that Republicans will remain trailing in the Senate and slightly ahead in the House.
Meanwhile, some of its American competitors, gathered under the acronym FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google), this year face “the end of an era”, in the words of the WSJ, “on the way to their worst simultaneous loss”. on Wall Street.
If Republicans are primarily targeting TikTok, Democrats are playing the same game with Elon Musk’s Twitter. Responding to a Bloomberg question last Wednesday, President Joe Biden himself stated or, in his own way, threatened:
“Elon Musk’s cooperation and/or technical relationships with other countries are worth examining. Whether or not he is doing something inappropriate… I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that it’s worth examining. I will say.”
Bloomberg suggests that it was a reference to the presence of a Chinese-born investor, among other foreigners, in the consortium put together by Musk to buy Twitter; and the fact that the automaker Tesla, also from him, takes 25% of the revenues from the Chinese market.
More than that, Musk’s own plans for Twitter, “one app for everything“, as he tweeted a month ago, refer to WeChat. When he started the effort to buy the platform, he projected his “conversion” into the Chinese super app, as he told the All-In podcast:
“If you’re in China, you kind of live on WeChat. It does everything. It’s kind of like Twitter plus PayPal, plus a bunch of stuff rolled into one, with a great interface. It’s a really great app, and we don’t we have nothing like that outside of China.”
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