In early July, according to data released by Sensor Tower, the Tik Tok App was downloaded by 180 million American users , that is, by more than half of the US population, including, easy to guess, the vast majority of members of Generation Z, conquered by the videos of the social network that rob President Trump and his collaborators of sleep.
Seen from the Chinese side, rather than the banning of the social controlled by Zang Yiming, promoter of Byte Dance, weighs the US blockade of WeChat, the platform controlled by the giant Tencent which on Thursday paid for the stop to US operations with a drop in value in the order of billions of dollars.
This time the target is not teenagers, but expatriates, i.e. the Chinese who live outside the Celestial Empire for whom this social network now represents an irreplaceable channel for families to communicate with students and keep the diaspora in contact with the motherland. In addition of course to the other gaming activities that have made Tencent a school case imitated by Facebook and other US giants, see Twitter, committed to understanding the commercial potential of social networks.
Even so it is explained the annoyance of the big names in digital business for Trump's incursions. The ban on US companies from collaborating with Chinese social networks can benefit Microsoft which, after paying a heavy toll in Washington, could buy Tik Tok (worth at least $50 billion). But the offensive of the president, furious about the distancing of Twitter and Facebook from the campaign for his re-election based on aggressive tweets bordering (or beyond) fake news, marks another break between Silicon Valley and the White House, another element to take into account in view of the next presidential campaign.
Certainly, the trade war has now escalated into one all-out warfare involving technology: first 5G, now artificial intelligence which, according to Trump, allows the key to influencing tastes, purchases and political opinions of the USA from reading the data collected over the years by Beijing companies on social media. And not only that: it's on Thursday the news that the Tik Tok archive for Europe will be built in Ireland.
