Marketers should be careful basing their business on TikTok
We recently saw the announcement of a training product on the topic of using TiKTok to build traffic to your website. TikTok is a growing social media platform. Wildly popular in China, it has spread around the world. It allows users to create musical clips, short clips up to 60 seconds. It has various special effects users can use to enhance their uploads to the site.
Wikipedia reports, “In 2019, TikTok was announced to be the 7th most downloaded mobile app of the decade, from 2010 to 2019.”
Today’s TikTok is an amalgam of the original TikTok, by the China tech company, ByteDance, with Musical.ly, another social media app that originated in America by the Santa Monica office of another company from China. The new TikTok was created when ByteDance bought Musical.ly.
The fact that this new app is controlled by a company in China raised concerns in the US government related to security. As you may recall, similar concerns were raised about the phone technology company, Huawei, about a year ago, and those concerns are not yet resolved.
“Could use of TikTok place spyware or other malware on the user’s computer or phone?” they wonder, for example. Conceivably, that could happen when someone uploads a clip to TikTok or when someone plays a clip.
We have no expertise in this area, and there may be no actual issues. But we have seen the news reports on the concerns and the investigation the US government is pursuing. Since we are a news organization, we felt our readers needed to be aware of this news. Promoting your products on TikTok may be one of your strategies. If so, you should take this investigation into consideration.
For more information about the investigation and the background leading up to it, check out this article:
TikTok Said to Be Under National Security Review.
The BBC also has had several stories in recent weeks about TiKTok, including some about the controversies surrounding it.
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