TikTok becomes a social media giant

BRISBANE: When English statesman Sir Francis Bacon famously said that knowledge is power, he could hardly have predicted the rise of ubiquitous social media some 500 years later. Social media platforms are some of the world's most powerful businesses, because they can collect massive amounts of user data and use algorithms to turn the data into actionable knowledge.

Today, TikTok has a suite of data-collection mechanisms and some of the best algorithms in the business.

It has 1.2 billion users as of December 2021, which makes it so addictive. By the end of 2022, this number is expected to rise to 1.8 billion.

The US Federal Communications Commission FCC wrote a strongly worded letter to the chief executives of Apple and Google last Tuesday, urging them to remove TikTok from their app stores on the grounds that the company or more precisely its Chinese parent ByteDance can't be trusted with US users data.

In his letter, FCC commissioner Brendan Carr said that TikTok is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, an organisation that is tied to the Communist Party of China and required by Chinese law to comply with the PRC's People's Republic of China surveillance demands.