THE SINICISATION OF THE GLOBAL INTERNET?
What about possible Chinese government influence? TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, a private company last valued at US$180 billion in December 2020, has ring-fenced its international operations by creating a separate corporate structure based in Singapore. TikTok says all its international users’ data is held in the US and Singapore and – from 2023 – in Ireland, too. The company insists no personal data flows to the Chinese government, nor would it give Beijing access to such data even if requested.
In his well-researched book, TikTok Boom, Chris Stokel-Walker investigated these claims. He found no evidence for systematic leakage of personal data. But engineers in China did access some data to test algorithms or spot bot attacks, for example.
“TikTok isn’t a social media sleeper cell waiting to be activated remotely on millions of Westerners’ phones,” he concluded. “The reality here is that there is no big con, but instead a little white lie.”
Even if that conclusion is correct, it might not help. Some US senators are still attacking TikTok as an instrument of Chinese soft power. There is a risk that the company might yet suffer the same fate as Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications equipment manufacturer blacklisted by the US.
But if TikTok can avoid becoming a geopolitical punchbag, it might come to symbolise a moment in the evolution of cyber space: The Sinicisation of the global Internet, as tech analyst Ben Thompson calls it.
In this digital world, more Chinese-style centralised control of content through recommendation algorithms becomes a feature, not a bug. For several decades, the US has dominated the norms, values and practices of the consumer Internet. The rise of TikTok points to a more contested future.
