What Makes TikTok Such a Challenge? Look to the Cute Cat Theory.

Este artículo está disponible en español también, traducido por Juan Arellano.

TikTok’s been in the news lately, for obvious reasons.

It’s worth noting what the challenge is here. Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory of the Internet is instructive. Here’s a summary from Wikipedia:

It posits that most people are not interested in activism; instead, they want to use the web for mundane activities, including surfing for pornography and lolcats (“cute cats”). The tools that they develop for that (such as Facebook, Flickr, Blogger, Twitter, and similar platforms) are very useful to social movement activists, who may lack resources to develop dedicated tools themselves. This, in turn, makes the activists more immune to reprisals by governments than if they were using a dedicated activism platform, because shutting down a popular public platform provokes a larger public outcry than shutting down an obscure one.

TikTok is a different beast from Huawei, another Chinese company that’s had its own snafus in the West. Here’s how Michael Schuman explains it in The Atlantic:

TikTok presents a very different conundrum [from Huawei]. For one, the app is already on millions of American smartphones. Washington’s concerns about data security in regards to China have been heightened by two recent hacks: of the credit-reporting firm Equifax in 2017, and of the federal government’s Office of Personnel Management in 2015. In both cases, security experts blame Beijing. The assumption is that Chinese authorities are compiling dossiers on U.S. citizens for unknown, but probably compromising, purposes. TikTok could be a handy device for stuffing the files with juicy new details. Even more, TikTok is in the business of content. It can just as readily act as a conduit for spreading information as collecting it — and therefore could be a propaganda tool for the Chinese state.

Now, while TikTok is being used for activism, it’s generally a place for the proverbial cute cat: funny videos, addictive algorithms and catchy music…