Bullywood v. TikTok?

So this time, India decided to ban TikTok permanently*, depriving the Chinese platform of 17% of the world population, and of a nation that will never reach herd immunity when it comes to dance and music.

The 59 Chinese apps banned by India

India will survive: it's much easier to replace an app with tens of existing rivals than, say, to dump Huawei for another 5G provider.

TikTok will survive, but that sets a disturbing precedent. Somehow, ByteDance has been exposed to this kind of risks ever since they swallowed Musical.ly two years ago, and many consider TikTok as a Trojan Horse for Beijing more subtle than WeChat. So when it spread even faster than coronavirus*, calls to flatten the curve multiplied. And when Zhang Yiming hired former Disney streaming boss Kevin Mayer to lead TikTok and to become ByteDance's COO, some saw it as - beyond the obvious reach for proven talent - a telltale sign that some sort of sheep's clothing was required to better face upcoming legal battles over US national security. Obviously, proposing distinct platforms for the Chinese market (Douyin) and overseas isn't enough.

The weeks and months to come will test many nations, players, and sectors as TikTok extends across new territories and verticals (health, education...). ByteDance could prolong its success with other assets such as Xigua Video, an even more direct competitor to YouTube: with its limit of 60' loops, TikTok itself can't go further than 2 hand washings, and you can imitate Twitter and double your core limit once, but your concept has to keep some consistency. Of course, along the way, ByteDance will further perfect its already impressive A.I. know-how (something among others that Vine didn't have).

Can TikTok's momentum be broken by this single setback? No. But if the US or the EU start weighing in, things could change.

One thing is sure: India is changing. And even before this episode, Narendra Modi was benchmarking China for online censorship***. This is not just about banning 59 apps from a coopetitor nation, but in the process, about rounding up all players in a most pervasive, theoretically open ecosystem.

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* along with 58 other apps, starting with WeChat 

** mentioning killer apps during a lockdown sounds obscene because it is, but TikTok and Zoom purely seized the moment
*** see for instance "India Proposes Chinese-Style Internet Censorship" (NYT 20190214)

Coronavirus and the end of herd impunity

Location based tracking apps, electronic ankles, drones... all technologies are being used to enforce lockdowns, quarantines and curfews, to search and destroy any will to ruin the common effort to flatten those damn curves.

At the herd level, our usage patterns brought precious insights about how both viruses (COVID-19 and STUPID-20) spread, most notably people flocking away from big cities to speed up curves across rural areas (Orange found that 17% of Parisians left the capital in the final hours before lockdown), or spring breakers sharing the fun during their spring breakout back home (see Tectonic's viral tweet below*):

When it comes to tracking individuals, Korea set the new standards very early with these alerts blaring on your phone each time a new case of COVID-19 pops up near you. You can't see the full individual's name but you know their age, their address, their nationality, and their exact path over the previous days. When on quarantine, you're tracked by GPS (three Vietnamese students were caught cheating in a Gunsan park - the truant officer found out that they left their phones home), you have to send every day your self-diagnosis on two different apps (one for the Ministry of Health, another for the Ministry of Interior), and you have to share your morning and afternoon temperatures by SMS - mercifully it's not intrusive to the point they send a drone to do it themselves.

And most of us are okay with the new safety-privacy trade-offs, because nowadays security means actual survival. Same thing with visual contacts. As we're deprived of basic liberties during confinement, we're willing to open our doors far wider than we would normally to co-workers, distant contacts or even total strangers. Somehow, as we grow our personal spheres, we're enabling more people to extend their reaches within them, break into our homes, Zoom into our interiors. Somehow, this virus has become the mother of all Troyan horses.

And when this pandemic is over, we probably won't return to normal. We won't mind when our operators charge us $5 a month for SD cards (as in Social Distancing), we won't flinch when they send electric shocks each time we come within 6 feet of other passers-by. 

As long as they let us graze on the greener side of the electric fence.


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* ICYMI

Want to see the true potential impact of ignoring social distancing? Through a partnership with @xmodesocial, we analyzed secondary locations of anonymized mobile devices that were active at a single Ft. Lauderdale beach during spring break. This is where they went across the US: pic.twitter.com/3A3ePn9Vin

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) March 25, 2020