The app’s success forced its competitors to reevaluate their products. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, turned them into “discovery engines” and launched Reels, which is an installation of a copy of videos posted on TikTok. 

Similar services were also launched through Pinterest (Watch TV), Snapchat (Spotlight), YouTube (Shorts), and Netflix (Fast Laughs). Spotify also took inspiration from the TikTok model to display video clips on the app’s main page.   

The American “political mood” fuels the conflict 

It is enough to realize the record time spent by the parent company of TikTok, i.e. “ByteDance”, which is based in China, and its investments in the United States in an attempt to dispel these fears and adhere to American conditions.

And standards in its management of the application, to understand that the “political mood” in Washington ( Unlike Al-Shaabi, it does not move in favor of TikTok, and that mistrust of China and its motives, and the United States’ efforts to slow down its rapid technical progress, are the primary driver of all its decisions.

Committee on Foreign Investment

 ByteDance spent more than three years negotiating with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which reviews files involving foreign parties for threats to national security. A draft agreement between the two parties has not been completed yet.

 The company also spent tens of millions of dollars building and expanding its presence in Washington, and invested more than a billion dollars in “Project Texas”, to store data through American companies to isolate it from China as much as possible, and to enhance independent oversight and transparency, to escape a law that the Chinese government initiated.

It has been in effect since 2017, and requires Chinese companies to give the government any personal data related to the country’s national security. According to the Financial Times, TikTok has a similar plan in Europe, called “Project Clover,” to store data in three centers, two in Ireland and one in Norway.

ByteDance

 Despite this, the “Tik Tok” application, which is the employer of seven thousand employees in the United States alone, faces the risk of being banned if ByteDance does not commit to selling its share to an American party, through a possible recommendation to the American president to force the divestment of the company under which it acquired. On the “Musical.ly” application, the predecessor to “Tik Tok”, something that China completely rejects.

An arm of the Chinese Communist Party?

The first obstacles appeared when ByteDance was forced late last year to admit that some of its employees had accessed TikTok data belonging to American journalists from Buzzfeed and the Financial Times while they were trying to track down the source of a leaked report about the company.

 However, this is not the first time that journalists have been spied on. Forbes revealed previous accusations against Uber and Facebook of committing similar actions over the years, as well as Microsoft’s search into a French blogger’s email account in 2012 to investigate the leaking of his trade secrets. 

However, not all of these companies faced the penalty of a possible ban in the United States on any given day, as none of them were owned by a Chinese company!

TikTok was not helped by the large diversity of ByteDance’s shareholders, most of whom are international investors who own 60 percent of the company’s shares, including the giant American investment companies BlackRock, General Atlantic, and Sequoia.

The company’s employees own 20 percent of its shares, while the remaining 20 percent is owned by the company’s founder, Zhang Yiming, who controls the company by owning a separate class of shares with additional voting rights, according to the Financial Times.   

Note that China, for its part, has not hesitated to ban a number of American applications and websites since 2009, including “Facebook,” “Instagram,” “YouTube,” “Twitter,” “Google,” and thousands of other “Western” websites. 

However, a similar step by the United States does not seem easy, and it would be a worrying precedent for this democratic country that upholds constitutional rights and freedom of expression, and any ban on the application that is not based on reliable logical and factual data would lead to this image being shaken. TikTok: A Political Economic and Cultural Conflict with a Technological Template

The ban could also lead to a backlash from major American investors who own a stake in TikTok. 

China’s opposition

China’s opposition to selling the application to an American company stems from its defense of the interests of its companies in general and the feasibility of its existence and prosperity in countries outside China, including the United States, Britain, New Zealand, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, Canada and others, which recommended banning the application from government agencies, in light of the “repression” and hostile approach that exposed to it.

It urged these countries to “respect the market economy” and provide a non-discriminatory environment for all companies.

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TikTok: A Political Economic and Cultural Conflict with a Technological Template

This is consistent with the opinion of Anupam Chander, a professor of global Internet regulation at Georgetown University, who said: “The danger facing the United States is that China may respond to this ban,” adding that “any ban on TikTok could be devastating.” International trade in its modern sense.

China’s Ministry of Commerce has explicitly said that any sale involving the export of technology must be “in accordance with Chinese laws,” as the Chinese government considers some advanced technologies, including content recommendation algorithms, essential to its national interest.

However, the Chinese position gave American lawmakers an additional pretext to support their claim that TikTok is not independent and that it is an arm of the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party.

Data security of national security

In short, it is an existential war, and the greatest of battles currently, between great powers that cannot live comfortably with the rise of the other’s influence. For the United States, data security is not only aimed at national security in the political and military sense, and it is showing increasing concern about China’s enormous intelligence capabilities.

Rather, it is a fear of new ideologies and cultures penetrating the minds of the American users of the application and their way of thinking with regard to political freedom and human rights, i.e. In contradiction to the values ​​promoted by the United States, in addition to manipulating the image that America works to project of its hegemonic foreign policy, whether honest or hypocritical.

It also contributes to the United States’ efforts to contain China’s technological expansion, especially in the field of artificial intelligence, in a proactive step to curb Beijing’s quest to outperform the West not only by increasing its reliance on cheap manual labor but also on technology and investment.

The hostility between the American and Chinese powers has worsened since last August after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, the largest microchip manufacturer in the world, after comprehensive restrictions imposed by the Biden administration on providing advanced semiconductor and chip-making equipment to Chinese companies, for fear of using the technology. advanced to develop its military systems, including weapons of mass destruction.

Huawei and ZTE

It was followed by the Chinese “spy balloon” that floated over the skies of the United States last February before being shot down by American planes, and finally, the visit of the Chinese President to Moscow to give legitimacy to Russian President Vladimir Putin after the International Criminal Court accused him of committing war crimes, in defiance of the international system that It is led by the United States and has been in place since the end of World War II.

At a previous stage, hostility reached its peak between the West and China when the US and Canada banned Huawei and ZTE after linking the two companies to alleged deep ties with the Chinese government.

However, Europe maintained its addiction to Chinese network equipment at the time. . But the matter changed with China siding with Russia in its invasion of Ukraine and the tendency of Germany and the Netherlands to ban Huawei and ZTE from their fifth generation networks.

Restrictions on Chinese companies

Washington also tightens restrictions on Chinese companies that wish to list their shares on American stock exchanges, and requires them to fully disclose financial information and audits. 

As a result, five major companies, “China Life Insurance”, “Petro China”, “China Petroleum”, “Aluminum Company of China”, and “Sinopac Shanghai Petrochemical”, canceled their listing on the New York Stock Exchange by order of Beijing, due to their unwillingness to comply with the rules of the United States. United Nations regarding audit transparency.

It is clear that “Tik Tok” is a political and military conflict with a technological template, just as it is a cultural conflict and freedoms, an existential conflict between two giants, each of which seeks to extend its control over the global system. 

The TikTok battle is not the first rain, but it will constitute a major turning point in US-Chinese relations, and the economic balance between the two parties is based on a lack of trust and mutual terror.