TikTok Boom: China's Dynamite App and the Superpower Race for Social Media

Andy Warhol's idea that anyone can be famous for 15 minuteshas never looked shakier. In the programme for an exhibitionin Stockholm in 1968, the American pop art pioneer wrote: 'In thefuture, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.' What struckmany at the time as an outlandish prediction is in danger of beingundercut by reality in the third decade of the 21st Century. OnTikTok, anyone with a mobile phone can become known to hundredsof millions of people for a matter of seconds, and then slipback into anonymity. True, a run of successful self-shot videos canpropel an individual from an everyday life into that of a multi-millionaire.Unlike in Warhol's age, however, the metamorphosisfrom ordinariness to fame occurs not through the multiple mediachannels of Andy Warhol's age, but through a single, super-fast, ever-mutating social media app. Which is ultimately owned inChina and ruled over by an inscrutable algorithm.

Existing celebrity doesn't determine success on TikTok.'Anyone has the potential to go viral on TikTok. You can have onefollower or a million followers, ' says Yazmin How, chief of TikTok'sUK editorial team. It meets at 9am daily to review some of the 1.6TIKTOK million videos uploaded to TikTok in the UK every 24 hours. (Only9% of users post videos; the remainder just watch them.) How andher colleagues' accounts have been stripped of the highly powerfulalgorithm, which serves up content according to a person's viewinghistory and interests. It's the God's eye view of TikTok, drinkingstraight from the gush of videos being posted every single day.

TikTok's algorithm works on what's called a 'content graph', looking at what you've previously engaged with, rather than a'social graph' – which accounts you follow. That makes it possiblefor a video to go super-viral from less than super surroundings.'We see things going viral all the time from people who havemaybe, like, 50 fans, who crack something, ' says How. 'There's norecipe for it. There's no magic formula.'

Such unpredictability makes the churn of celebrities throughTikTok so speedy. They're people like Curtis Roach, whose rapabout being stuck at home during the pandemic turned him fromsomeone with $12 to his name to a celebrity musician, or NathanEvans, a Scottish postman whose sea shanties landed him a recorddeal that many would kill for. One minute these people were justlike you and me. Then they were put up on a digital pedestal, admired and envied the world over.

This book is about these 'no-one to someone' videomakers– 'creators' – but it also tells the story of TikTok's rise and theimpact it's having on society, from pop music to politics. Andmore... because to view TikTok as just the platform is to miss thebigger debate. Yes, TikTok's rise is meteoric. Yes, it's creating anew generation of celebrities – many of whom are younger thanthe YouTubers who came before them. But the rise of TikTok haswider ramifications, arising from the fact that it was made by, andis still owned by, a Chinese company. Having spent so long merelymaking phones and computers for Western companies, Chinais now rapidly pushing into software and artificial intelligence.Beijing plans to spend more than $1.4 trillion in the next five yearsdeveloping next-generation technologies. The country has goalsbeyond its borders, and TikTok is caught up in a debate held incapitals across the globe whether the short form video sharing appis a Trojan horse for a bigger tech invasion from East (CommunistChina in particular and Asia more generally) to West (chieflythe capitalist economies of the USA and Europe). Or whether it'ssimply a private company trying to become a mainstay in a worldpreviously dominated by big companies in a 130 square kilometreparcel of land in the San Francisco Bay in California, better knownas Silicon Valley. The two sides of the argument are entrenchedand far apart.

TikTok has mutated into something of a proxy war over thefuture of the technology we rely on in our everyday lives. And theoutcome could potentially dictate the future direction of the appswe install on our phones, and where our data goes. For the last 20years, Westerners have knowingly handed over the most intimatedetails of our lives, from our favourite brand of pasta to our illnessesto our underwear size, to the GAFA companies based in theUnited States (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon). It's a trustthat successive scandals have shown to be misplaced. TikTok'sorigins lie elsewhere, in a country Westerners fear would morewillingly sacrifice personal rights to protect its national interests.With increasing amounts of our lives being transacted online, does it matter if our data and our money stays within the controlof a few firms in Silicon Valley or starts to migrate to data serverscontrolled by companies ultimately run out of China?

Politicians outside China certainly seem to think so, which is why TikTok, alongside Huawei and other Chinese innovations, have become the subjects of searching criticism and investigationsin the West. TikTok was thrust squarely into the sights of DonaldTrump, who, while the US President in 2020, decided to make ashort-form video-sharing app – beloved by teens for lip-syncingpop songs – the enemy in a national security investigation, with investigations in India, Japan, Australia, Europe and the UnitedKingdom were delving into whether TikTok was, despite theanalyses of multiple cyber-security experts, secreting informationto Chinese spies. Politicians have shown they will act, too: Indiabanned TikTok in June 2020, alongside 58 other apps developedwithin China's borders – a move made permanent in January 2021, leaving a dedicated audience of 200 million users without a home, and thousands of employees without a job.

Unsurprisingly, given the growth and power of its business, TikTok is fighting back, in the US and elsewhere. After a steadyrumble of discontent that grew into deliberate PR campaignswarning that it was becoming a pawn in a broader geopoliticalbattle, the company protested that 'the [Trump] Administrationpaid no attention to facts, dictated terms of an agreement withoutgoing through standard legal processes, and tried to insert itselfinto negotiations between private businesses.' Less than threeweeks later, TikTok filed a lawsuit against the US President, alleginghe had run roughshod over normal governmental practice andthe first and fifth amendments in order to score political points andjeopardise the future of a new driver of the global economy. Whatwas once the story of an enormously popular app's impact on ouronline and offline culture had been hurled into a tussle betweenthe world's two biggest superpowers.

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This book, then, tells the story of TikTok, where it came from andhow it has transformed our society and taken over the world. Withthe help of those who've been intimately acquainted with the innerworkings of TikTok, you'll learn how the company operates, whatits goals are, and where it's going. You'll discover the complicatedlineage of the world's fastest-growing app, and where it's provingpopular and why. You'll learn about the company behind it, whichis challenging Google in its own backyard and wants to do muchmore than entertain you with diverting videos. All are importantto understand TikTok's out-sized impact on the world, and tomake your own informed decision as to whether the increasinglyheated debate over its impact stems from xenophobic agitprop orwell-evidenced concerns about the long-term future of our digitaloverlords and their government connections.

But beyond that, we'll track what the growth of TikTok reallymeans for us all, for security, privacy and propaganda for thenext 25 years or more of our lives. We could be on the cusp of asignificant shift in the base of power for almost everything we doonline. We're not just talking about which celebrities we idoliseand which app we turn to when we're bored. What happens nowcould shape how we shop, how we bank, and who controls ourdata – and where it ultimately ends up. It's the reason why a USPresident tried to stifle TikTok's growth, and why the outcomeof that argument – being considered by Joe Biden, the new USPresident, amid continued frostiness with China – matters quiteso much.

On occasion, there will be more questions than answers –simply because TikTok's ascendancy is so new and so stratospheric.History is happening right before our eyes. But you'll put downthis book knowing far more than when you started, and you'llcertainly be better equipped to enter the debate.

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