Facebook has been preparing a global launch of its answer to TikTok for over a year, and it can’t come soon enough.
Instagram Reels was launched last November in Brazil before being extended to France and Germany last month. It also launched just last week in India after the country banned TikTok over its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. With the United States discussing a similar ban, Facebook finally appears to be moving toward a global launch in more than 50 countries.
TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based company ByteDance. The company cannot legally refuse to share data with the CCP under Chinese law, and in 2018, ByteDance founder and CEO Zhang Yiming promised in a letter that the company would “further deepen cooperation” with the party.
It’s not difficult to imagine that this entire story will make certain pockets of the media livid. Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post have valiantly come to TikTok’s defense. The media is still livid at Facebook for supposedly masterminding the defeat of Hillary Clinton because Russians posted a few little-seen memes on the site. One could only imagine the reaction of Taylor Lorenz to discovering the app that her job is based around has shifted from the Chinese communists to the evil Mark Zuckerberg.
It shouldn’t need to be said that the data collection on an app such as Facebook or Instagram is nothing like TikTok being subject to the whims of the Chinese government. That any and all TikTok data could be handed over to the CCP in an instant makes its other privacy faults all the more dangerous. For example, TikTok was caught logging keystrokes and copying user’s clipboards by a recent Apple iOS update despite the company insisting it was a third-party issue that they had resolved in April.
Wells Fargo has already banned the use of TikTok by employees, and Congress is looking at a bill to ban the app from all government devices. Whether the U.S. government can legally ban TikTok wholesale or not, Facebook’s entry into the marketplace with a benign version of the app is fantastic news.
