TikTok, defense or robbery

Whoever thought that fortune on the Internet was within their reach faced an insurmountable problem. What kind of new service can you invent when someone has already invented it and is making good money from it?

Then again, every now and then something new appears and in no time conquers the world and earns billions, users and dollars, with users being worth much more. At the moment, the most interesting case is the TikTok application, something like Twitter, but instead of "little bits of wisdom" short videos are uploaded there, the crazier the better.

The TikTok application was created in China in 2012 within the Bytedance company, whose founder is Zhang Yiming. In fact, the Chinese version of the service was first created under the name Doujin, which is very important for later developments.

Doujin, or TikTok, allows you to record a short video from 3 to 15 seconds, with various effects. The most popular is the playing of a well-known song, with which you wind up on "playback". Videos can be looped and repeated for a whole minute. And that's all wisdom.

The service started working in China in 2016, and a year later it was launched worldwide under the name TikTok. Today it is used in more than 150 countries and has about 800 million users, acquired in just three years. It is listed as one of the most popular apps, and it is believed that a third of Americans have it on their mobile phones. If you want your business to be heard, you have to create a campaign on TikTok.

That's the romantic side of the story. But there is another, darker one, in which the Chinese company is accused in the West of collecting user data, under the pretext of using artificial intelligence to improve their experience. What other companies do, Google, Facebook, Amazon and other brothers, but with one big difference. The US government cannot order US companies to hand over user data, while in China such orders are carried out without question.

Until now, there have been loud objections to American companies that collect our data, but they have occasionally entered into conflict with the state, which was their argument that our data is safe with them, that is, it will not be used against us. Now, for the first time, a Chinese company has expanded to the world, without such a guarantee.

Fuel was added to that fire when American users via the TikTok platform sabotaged Trump's political rally in Oklahoma by agreeing to sign up en masse (the number of places was limited due to the pandemic) and then not show up.

It was a last straw for Trump and he made the decision to ban TikTok in the US. Microsoft jumped in with the idea of ​​buying the American part of this company, and Trump gave them a deadline of September 15. The Chinese have entered into negotiations, but it seems that they intend to delay until November (presidential elections in the USA), if possible, because in the meantime they announced that they are moving the company's headquarters to London and that they will no longer be under pressure from the Chinese state. They also claim that the international TikTok and the Chinese Doujin are two independent entities and that the Chinese state does not interfere with users outside of China. They also add that this is not about user protection, but about the outrageous theft of a successful Chinese product.

During this time, users acquire a new type of addiction due to hours of watching short videos. It's a wonder what can fit in 15 seconds, and only four viewed posts fill your minute. Minute by minute, a day passes.