TikTok: 5 key moments in the history of the ByteDance app – 03/16/2024 – #Hashtag

The United States House on Wednesday passed the Protecting Americans from Applications Controlled by Foreign Adversaries Act. If it also advances in the Senate, the legislation could ban TikTok and other Chinese networks from the country. ByteDance, owner of TikTok, has 165 days to sell it, which shouldn’t be so easy, since Chinese regulation prevents the algorithm from being sold to foreign companies.

If ByteDance does not end its shareholding, application stores and hosting services in the US will be prohibited from offering the social network to the 170 million users in the country. The project has bipartisan support and was approved in an overwhelming vote of 352 congressmen in favor and just 65 against.

O #Hashtag recalls 5 key moments in the history of TikTok, the most popular Chinese platform in the Western world — and, by extension, the most controversial.

Emergence

TikTok is ByteDance’s most successful product, a company known as an “application factory”. It didn’t appear overnight.

In September 2016, ByteDance launched Douyin, a lip sync app to compete with Musical.ly, which dominated the market. In May 2017, there was a rebranding for the Western market, and Douyin was renamed TikTok.

But there was a delicate problem of penetration. Users from countries like the United States, Europe and Brazil still preferred Musical.ly. The solution was to buy it for an estimated value of US$1 billion (around R$5 billion), and then gradually close it in 2018.

1st boom

At the end of 2018, an unknown social network began to lead several rankings for the most downloaded app in the United States. It was the first contact for many adults with the Chinese tool dominated by teenagers and famous for its dance videos. Folha columnist Ronaldo Lemos chose TikTok as the app of the year. “TikTok is a powerhouse of artificial intelligence, capable of deeply understanding the preferences of those who use it,” he wrote.

Pandemic burst

With much of the planet at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, TikTok achieved, in the first half of 2020, the best performance of an app so far: 315 million downloads. The creative use of easy-to-edit videos was the perfect combination at that moment.

In September 2021, the network reached 1 billion monthly active users, consolidating itself among the big leagues, alongside Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and YouTube.

Trump’s offensive

In August 2020, amid the TikTok boom, former American President Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban it from the United States, citing a threat to national security.

There was a commotion in the country, especially among young people, the largest share of users. Amid a complex legal dispute, the process was closed at the beginning of the Biden administration without the app ever going offline.

After the Chamber approved the new law that could ban the application, the Republican changed his speech. For him, “without Tiktok you make Facebook bigger. There are a lot of people in the US who love the app, there are a lot of young people who love TikTok and who would go crazy without it.”

As a backdrop to this story, billionaire Jeff Yass, controlling 15% of ByteDance, is the largest individual donor to the Republican party in this election cycle, with US$46 million (about R$227 million).

Cold War

Despite ending the Trump administration’s executive order, Democrat Joe Biden’s government never enjoyed a honeymoon with the Chinese network.

TikTok is yet another element within a more complex anti-China discourse, with economic and geopolitical repercussions.

In 2023, for example, the Biden administration supported the Restrict Act, in which the US required Chinese owners to sell their shares to avoid being banned from the country. When presenting the project in the Senate, Democrat Mark R. Warner, from the state of Virginia, was emphatic: “Today, the threat that everyone talks about is TikTok.”

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