We hear a lot about TikTok in the news these days. Even though its future is uncertain at the moment, plenty of influencers and businesses rely on them to get the word out about their brands. This infographic from Vizion Online helps businesses figure out what TikTok is all about:
Source: Statista
On April 4, the Australian government decided to greenlight banning TikTok from all federal-owned devices like smartphones and tablets. The ban will be enforced “as soon as practicable,” according to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus. Australia is the last country in the so-called Five Eyes, a loose network of the intelligence services of the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada, to implement such a ban. As our chart shows, only five countries worldwide put out a blanket ban on TikTok, located almost exclusively in Asia.
The most notable example is India. In 2019, the country banned the short-form video app for some time, allegedly due to concerns about spreading content unsafe for minors. This ban proved temporary, but in June 2020, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology banned 59 Chinese apps, including TikTok, to curb the perceived spread of Chinese influence in the country. Other countries with general bans include Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, Iran and Jordan. The latter plans to lift a temporary ban from December of 2022 instated in the aftermath of the death of a police officer at the hands of protesters at some point. Talks with TikTok’s parent company ByteDance haven’t yet led to a conclusive decision on the app’s future in the country.
In the eyes of some U.S. lawmakers, the United States should join the countries banning the app not only from government-owned but also from private devices soon. While officials claim that it’s unclear whether the Chinese government can extract and use data of Western TikTok users, which poses too big of a security risk, critics of the push for a blanket ban on TikTok argue that the motivations are either latent sinophobia or limiting China’s soft power in a new Cold War. The appearance of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew before Congress this past week did little to assuage the concerns of hardliners on this topic. Whether or not TikTok siphons off and, upon request, distributes more or less sensitive user data than its U.S. counterparts is unclear.
Source: Statista
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms and is at the same time viewed critically by the U.S. and numerous European countries due to its alleged connection to China. This past Thursday, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew fielded questions at a congressional hearing, with some lawmakers drawing ridicule from netizens for allegedly not understanding the workings of social media apps. The question of to what extent the popular app is directly connected to the CCP is currently unanswered.
Critics of the regulatory efforts claim that the increased scrutiny of the application even though it allegedly doesn’t collect more or fewer data than U.S.-based social media companies is a symptom of a new Cold War and latent sinophobia. Still, U.S. TikTok users seem to mind giving away their data for advertising less than the general public surveyed in our Statista Consumer Insights.
38 percent of survey participants using TikTok tolerate advertising on the internet in exchange for free access to certain services, four percent more than the total number of adults surveyed. Almost 15 percent of TikTok users struggle to distinguish between advertising and other content.
A data point that’s particularly relevant in the context of the ongoing discussion surrounding TikTok: The usage of user data for advertising purposes. While 13 percent of respondents have no problems with companies using their data this way, the share of TikTok users claiming the same is five percentage points higher.
According to analyses by DataReportal, TikTok had an addressable ad audience older than 18 of around 113 million users in the United States at the end of 2022, the highest of any of the countries analyzed. Since the platform can be used from the age of 13, the number of users is likely significantly higher. The last official overall tally was released in September of 2021, claiming that the app broke the one-billion-user mark.
