Battle rages for TikTok

The runaway success of TikTok means that its parent company, ByteDance, is thundering up on the shoulder of Meta in the race to be the world’s largest social media company. Its explosive growth has forced the likes of YouTube and Instagram to dash out copycat short video formats, and ByteDance is estimated to have pulled in revenues of $120bn in 2023, a 40% increase on the previous year and a whisper shy of Meta’s $135bn, which represented a mere 16% annual growth.

The vast majority of its revenue comes from China, but sales in the US were estimated at $16bn last year, a big enough number to bring it to the attention of Congress, which has approved a bill to force TikTok to be flogged to a non-Chinese company within six months or it will face a ban from US app stores. The bill still needs to be ratified by the Senate and the president, if he remembers to do so, and to the lay observer the legal principle of “your company’s really successful so we’ll be having it” does feel a little 19th century.

Understandably Beijing is a little less than overjoyed at the prospect of a forced sale, and attempts to justify the move on the grounds of national security do seem a little far-fetched. The most popular content provider on the platform is a certain Khaby Lame, whose major contribution to the zeitgeist has been a video in which he responds to someone’s method of peeling a banana, which does seem to be quite a few dominoes away from getting hold of the nuclear codes.

ByteDance is estimated to have pulled in revenues of $120bn in 2023, just shy of Meta’s $135bn