Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…They merged the platforms in 2018. That's crazy. I didn't know that's all they did there. By the end of 2018, the combined platforms Douyin and TikTok have 500 MAU worldwide which is more than 2X Snap and already 50% of Instagram. It's the most downloaded app in the iOS App Store for all of 2018. Of course, downloads don't translate to retain users but still pretty impressive. Users spend an average of 52 minutes a day in the app which I believe is significantly higher than any other social network out there. This year, in 2019, TikTok has another 300 million MAU to get this to 800 million MAU total worldwide. They are approaching Facebook and Instagram scale here. Before we wrap up history facts, we can't not talk about the coda here with Facebook and US, and China and everything going on between the countries and indeed between these companies right now. As we all know, 2019 hasn't exactly been a banner year for US and China political relations and we talked about this a lot in the first episode of the season on our Huawei episode. In January 2019, the think tank Peterson Institute for International Economics comes out and says that TikTok is a "Huawei-sized problem." I was thinking about this during our Huawei Episode. It could be potentially larger than a Huawei-sized problem in terms of a national security threat to the US. Particularly, for many, many reasons, but one specific use case is that lots of military personnel use TikTok. There are many videos of people in western militaries, they are using it and TikTok is getting their location data, their facial data, biometric data through that, which the company is owned by Bytedance which is a Chinese Company. If the Chinese government were to request that data from Bytedance, even if they didn't want to give it to them, they would legally be forced to comply and give that data to the Chinese government. This news changes everyday so this may even change by the time we even release this episode. The Bytedance executives are regularly asked this question and regularly say,"Oh no, we won't do that. " But as you say, you would be legally— They may want not to do that. Alex has talked about this. For the version of TikTok in the western countries, not Douyin, the data is actually stored in the U.S. I believe on AWS, on Amazon servers on the US. There’s that, but again, legally, it's owned by Bytedance. Would they have to give that data to the Chinese government if they ask for it? Then this becomes even more acute in Spring of 2019 and through the summer and through today when the protest in HongKong start and interestingly, they're blowing up on social media all around the western world, particularly on Twitter and so much discussion of it everywhere, but interestingly, not so much on TikTok. Then people start asking the question, "Why aren't people talking about the HongKong protest on TikTok?" Is it because what TikTok says, "Hey, this is a platform for goofing off. This is for making fun, entertaining content," or is it because TikTok is censoring post about the protest?…

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