UK Edition
When Lucy Hitchcock’s fledgling business finally started gaining momentum, she decided to post a celebratory video on TikTok.
The British entrepreneur had founded Partner in Wine seven months earlier, selling insulated wine bottles and tumblers. She had the idea after balmy weather left her swigging warm rosé at socially-distanced drinks outdoors.
Hitchcock hadn’t expected much of a reaction to her video – so she was stunned when it led to a 1,700pc jump in sales overnight.
“I’d made thousands of pounds of sales and it was only seven o’clock in the morning,” she recalls. “Every time I checked the video, it would go up by 20,000 views at a time.
“I sat in my office all day, just shaking and thinking ‘What the hell?’.”
Today, social media is the “driving force” behind her business. The 31-year-old credits viral posts on TikTok for bringing Selfridges, Liberty London and Oliver Bonas to her door – along with half her annual sales.
Hitchcock is among a growing cohort of “bizfluencers” who speak directly to customers through the social media app, which has 23 million users in the UK.
Over one billion people around the world use TikTok to share cooking recipes, clips of their pets, news stories, tarot card readings, workout videos, book recommendations and more.
Yet despite the app's wild popularity, particularly among teens and twenty-somethings, the platform is facing a reckoning as western politicians fret about its links with China.
The European Commission and the US and Canadian governments have all banned officials from using the app on state devices, with calls from some quarters to go even further.
On Tuesday, Republicans in the US House of Representatives discussed a ban that would extend to members of the public, a move that would cut off an estimated 100 million Americans.
Josh Hawley, a Republican senator and outspoken China critic, has warned that TikTok risks giving Beijing a “backdoor into Americans' lives” if it is allowed to operate unchecked.
In the UK, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith says the app is a “Chinese government data harvester”, while foreign affairs committee chairman Alicia Kearns warns it could let Beijing “capitalise on our vulnerabilities”.
“Yet again, the Government is dragging its heels,” adds Sir Iain. “The UK should recognise the threat and act now.”
The Government has so far resisted the calls. On Tuesday, Michelle Donelan, the Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary, said the UK Government would not impose any restrictions, arguing that using TikTok should remain a matter of “personal choice” for citizens.
On the face of it, TikTok is like any other social media app: it entertains and connects people around the world with DIY content generated by users. The app hoovers up vast amounts of your data but so do competitors such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
The difference? Who might benefit from the data.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Beijing-headquartered company, meaning it is subject to national security laws passed by the Chinese government in 2017. These require companies to hand over any data that is requested by the state, says Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University.
Data collected by the app includes the rough location of users and personal information such as date of birth, email addresses and phone numbers. TikTok also asks to track what else users do on their phones and access contacts.
“I don't think TikTok is worse than others in terms of the information it harvests,” Woodward says. “But with something like Facebook, they're doing it because they're going to sell that data for profit.
“The thing with the Chinese is, why are they collecting? You can't help but conclude that the 2017 laws mean there is a possibility they could be collecting it for something other than commercial reasons.”
TikTok insists that it would never hand user data over, even if ordered by Beijing.
Some researchers have also cast doubt over just how powerful the information gathered by TikTok is. The Internet Governance Project claimed data gleaned by TikTok could easily be obtained elsewhere by China on the open market. It concluded that TikTok was most likely “a commercially-motivated enterprise”, not a Trojan horse.
Yet the company has conceded that Chinese staff could access data on American and European customers remotely, under certain circumstances.
Troubling, too, is the case of Cristina Criddle, a British journalist who TikTok staff attempted to spy on using internal company data. Criddle was targeted after she wrote articles for the Financial Times that staff believed were based on employee leaks.
Incidents like this feed the concerns of Western officials. What is to stop the Chinese government from harvesting its data to spy on people, say critics, or manipulating TikTok’s algorithm to censor certain ideas while promoting others during an election?
However, calls to ban the app are still seen as an extreme option and one that may not even be practicable.
Ordering internet providers in the US or Europe to block TikTok online could be easily circumvented by tech-savvy users, who could use “proxy” systems to hide their country of origin, according to Surrey’s Woodward.
To draw blood, Woodward suggests, governments would have to somehow compel smartphone makers Apple and Google to block the app on their systems. Given the dominance of iPhone and the Android operating systems, the move would probably deter most casual users.
Yet even then, those who were determined to get through could still find workarounds – and the app would likely morph into a wild west of misinformation.
“It won't stop TikTok being used,” explains Woodward. “It will just drive it underground.”
Beyond the technical aspects, there is also the not-insignificant issue of free speech. Should governments really step in to stop people using a video-sharing app?
The American Civil Liberties Union says not: “Americans have a right to use TikTok and other platforms to exchange our thoughts, ideas, and opinions,” the group said in a letter to US lawmakers.
Asked about the proposed ban in the US, TikTok insists it has already gone “above and beyond” to show US officials that its platform is harmless.
The company has submitted to allowing US tech giant Oracle to examine its app updates before they are pushed out, while it has also moved American user data to computer servers housed in the country. Similar steps are being taken in Europe.
A spokesman says: “It would be unfortunate if the House foreign affairs committee were to censor millions of Americans, and do so based not on actual intelligence, but on a basic misunderstanding of our corporate structure.”
As the row rumbles on, millions of influencers and entrepreneurs like Hitchcock risk getting caught in the crossfire.
“TikTok is an amazing, entrepreneurial community,” she says. For her, a ban would be “hugely sad.”