TikTok’s Race To Become Bigger Amid All Controversy

A fun app with some ‘serious’ plans.

What Happened?

On Monday, Tiger Global Management said that it has purchased shares in Bytedance, which is the parent company of TikTok, over the past 21 months but it didn’t disclose the size of investment. The Financial Times reported that ByteDance has reached an implied valuation of between $90 billion and $100 billion in the secondary market.

Why Does This Matter?

Before we answer this question, let us give you a quick update on some of the major problems faced by the app in the past few months.

• Earlier on September 25, an investigation by the Guardian showed that TikTok was instructing its moderators to censor videos that mentioned topics sensitive to the Communist Party of China: Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, and the religious group Falun Gong, for instance.
• In October, several US senators asked for a strict assessment of the potential national security risks of TikTok by US intelligence officials.
• Later on November 1, Reuters reported that the federal Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) said that it would launch a review of ByteDance’s near $1 billion acquisition of Musical.ly. Sources told New York Times that the US government had evidence that TikTok was sending US user data to China.
• As per leaked documents obtained by The Intercept, it was said that TikTok has instructed moderators to suppress posts created by users deemed too ugly, poor or disable for the platform and this news came on March 16, 2020.

So, coming back to the question — It matters because TikTok is continuing to become big despite all the scrutiny faced by ByteDance

How TikTok Is Expanding?

• TikTok entered the eLearning market in India with the #EduTok program last year, and this move was done to compete with YouTube in the increasing eLearning space, which is estimated to grow to around $2 billion by 2021.
• The company is also expanding into businesses like gaming and search. It launched a mobile game in Japan last December and it was the most downloaded free iOS title in the Japanese market for four straight days from March 7, as per data from App Annie. This move of launching the app sharpened its rivalry with gaming giant Tencent Holdings.
• In July 2020, ByteDance said that it is building a general search engine for a more ideal user experience, a move which will come as a challenge to Chinese search giant Baidu.

In conclusion, TikTok is becoming big and it is showing no signs of a slowdown. With most of the places around the globe being kept under a lockdown, TikTok is helping people by launching new programs as well as initiatives and making their lives a little bit better everyday. Since we all know that every coin has two sides, let us be a little bit cautious on what we share and how much we trust these apps. Because you can never be too careful!

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