Dear MEL Topic Readers,
What happened when the world’s most populous nation turned off TikTok
Released in 2016 by ByteDance, a Beijing-based internet technology
company, TikTok, or Douyin in China, is a short video service that hosts
user-submitted videos. The mobile app allows users to create short videos that
often feature music in the background. When recording videos within the app, they
can range from 15 seconds up to three minutes long, but if you are uploading
videos to the app, they can be up to 10 minutes long. There are over 700
million Douyin users mainly in China and over one billion TikTok active users
in other countries. TikTok has come under scrutiny due to data privacy
violations, addictiveness, misinformation, and data collection by the Chinese
government. Earlier this month, the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed
a bill that could lead to a nationwide ban against TikTok on the grounds of
national security. If the bill passes the Senate and is signed by the
President, around 170 million users in the US, or half of the population, will
lose access to the popular app. Here is an example of such a case. In 2020, after
a violent clash on the India-China border, India abruptly banned TikTok, which shocked
the country’s 200 million users. Surprisingly, it didn’t take long before TikTok
users found alternatives.
Read the article and learn about what could happen if one popular app
becomes unavailable.
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