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Tiktok is so popular that it now faces an imminent ban in America, unless it sells off to an American company. The fact that it is the world’s most downloaded app, and the fact that it is the most visited domain just points out to the mercurial rise of this platform. Those who want TikTok banned say its parent company bytedance has ties to the Chinese Communist Party CCP and so Americans private data could be spied on by China. Donald Trump has since flip flopped on TikTok and says banning TikTok will just give other content platforms such as Facebook more power, which the right sees as left leaning platforms. Donald Trump was banned by Facebook, X, YouTube amongst other platforms because on January 6 2021, he urged his supporters to match onto Capitol Hill and attempt to stop the certification of the electoral college win of Joe Biden. His erstwhile supporter Rep. Elise Stefanik has meanwhile said that she would again not certify the results on January 6 2025 unless Donald Trump wins. Nearly all the platforms have reinstated Trump’s accounts but he appears to have stuck to his own social media company Truth Social as an avenue to reach out to his supporters.

But really, how did TikTok get so big? The magic of TikTok is in its content discovery algorithm. This makes it easy to unearth newbies whereas on Facebook and X, it’s mostly public figures and celebrities that have the most followers. It appears that on TikTok, new content is weighted more and that’s why a lot of people are going viral on TikTok. A lot of platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube are copying the short video form content of YouTube, with Instagram reels and YouTube shorts being viewed as the way to pander to the TikTok audience. In a lot of online platforms, you are likely to consume content that your friends are also consuming, and so that means it’s very hard for a newbie to break in. It’s a kind of an echo chamber. The fact that the views are short form means one can pack their content as several TikTok videos and get their message across. TikTok is a threat not just to the entertainment platforms, but also e-commerce sites such as Amazon. TikTok marketplace has over 7 million registered small businesses that use TikTok to generate their sales.

As studies show that more Americans are spending more time on social media apps, 4 hours per day, than on TV, 3 hours per day, this means TikTok is the go to place for news and entertainment, and this will largely displace legacy media. How Facebook and X can compete with TikTok is by having a better algorithm that unearths newbie content. Or they could offer advertising rebates for free so that content from newbies can go to the top. There is a wide agreement that China is an imminent threat to America. It’s a bipartisanship issue, by both Republicans and Democrats that China poses an existential threat to the United States and the relations have to be managed, that’s why the Biden administration did not reverse the trade tariffs former President Trump instituted against Chinese made goods. China last week banned Facebook and Whatsapp from the apple store, in an anticipation of an imminent TikTok ban in America where the condition is that it must sell to an American company or close business in America.