Is TikTok Using Kids?

The next big thing in social media, TikTok, is fun, irreverent, and Made in China. It’s also got some unusual ideas about censorship and free speech

- David Ramli and Shelly Banjo

Most nights, from around 7 till midnight, Sydney Jade is on TikTok, the smartphone app of the moment. The platinum blond teenager films herself singing show tunes, doing jumping jacks, and joking around with store clerks at a Walmart not far from her home in Oklahoma. Her short music videos and live streams are popular— Jade has 284,000 followers, some of whom periodically send her virtual gifts, like 99¢ Rainbow Puke stickers.

Jade’s parents resisted TikTok at first. They hadn’t heard of the app and, Jade says, “didn’t like the idea of strangers watching me sing alone in front of the pink curtains in my bedroom.” But she convinced them that TikTok was “friendlier for kids than other apps like Facebook.” They let her join last year, just as, it seems, every other teenager signed on as well. In January, TikTok was the most downloaded app in the Android and iPhone stores, according to research firm Sensor Tower Inc.

The story sounds a lot like the rise of other social media powers such as Instagram and Snapchat, both of which pitched themselves as alternatives to Facebook’s big blue app. But TikTok wasn’t created by Stanford students Mark Zuckerberg could buy off or spend into the ground. It’s a subsidiary of a Beijing startup, Bytedance Ltd., that’s built a collection of valuable apps in China powered by vast troves of data and sophisticated artificial intelligence. Last year, Bytedance’s investors valued the company at $75 billion, the most of any startup in the world.