TikTok, the social media app owned by China’s ByteDance, wants all of you. Its latest goal is subsidized e-commerce to outcompete Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Temu, Shein, and other brands with online marketplaces—especially Amazon.
“TikTok Shop” has already been introduced in other global markets, including Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.
Will it also include TikTok trucks racing the ubiquitous Amazon and Uber vehicles clogging our highways? Or TikTok Air jousting for scarce airport berths with FedEx and UPS?
TikTok Air seems like a no-brainer as a glam marketing addition, even if it has only one plane to fly around its top influencers. This isn’t advice to TikTok, which is the relatively friendly face of Beijing’s totalitarian state. Nobody should give advice that would empower a dictator, terrorist, murderer, or other threat to our lives and liberties.
Instead, it’s a warning to democracies to be on guard against the latest and greatest new types of CCP propaganda. The slicker and more expensive the look, the more likely it has some link to the biggest and fastest-growing authoritarian economy in Asia.
The economic stakes are huge, even without a super app that goes all the way to offering nonstop white-glove influencer flights to Shanghai.
China’s fast-fashion Shein upstart is already raking in $800 million in annual profits. Amazon made $225 billion in 2022. Globally, TikTok seeks to quadruple its merchandise transactions from $1 billion last year to $4 billion in 2023. That’s just the start of its money-making ambitions.
As online platforms evolve and expand, they attempt to leverage their billions of existing users to gain market synergies and economies of scale by offering more services and better experiences that exclude the competition and give an advantage into the next round against surviving super app competitors.
This competition of the century is over users from the world’s biggest economies in the United States, Europe, China, India, and beyond. Given the importance of social media to public sentiment and voting in democracies, the feud between Chinese and U.S. super apps is geopolitical. Whoever controls the super apps of the future controls the future.
TikTok is in a global race with Twitter (now X), Facebook (now Meta), Google (now Alphabet), and Amazon (originally envisioned as Cadabra)—all of which are U.S. companies—to monopolize your screen time. While TikTok isn’t the largest app by users, it’s one of the fastest growing.
TikTok is different and more dangerous because of the loyalties of its users. Founded in 2016, it already has 113 million active users in the United States. They are skewed to the youthful side, with about half being Gen Z (late teens to early 20s). Most of the rest are Gen Y (late 20s to early 40s). That relatively young demographic is key for future advertising revenues, with Facebook now seen as Grandpa’s social media about to go the way of AOL’s “You’ve got mail.”
TikTok is critical as a CCP propaganda outlet because its young users are now growing up with a skewed conception of the world, including ignorance or, worse, acceptance of the genocidal CCP’s link to their social media life. The danger with super apps—especially if controlled by Beijing—is that they will increasingly influence future generations’ thinking. TikTok is simultaneously normalizing CCP aggression while putting the United States in the worst light imaginable.
Down that path lies the destruction of American values from within.
