Happy Lunar New Year from the USC US-China Institute!
TikTok in three charts
President Trump is worried that user data from the 45.4 million Americans on TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, could be handed over to the Chinese government and set a September 15th deadline for the app to be sold to a U.S. company or risk being banned.
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President Trump is worried that user data from the 45.4 million Americans on TikTok, owned by Chinese company ByteDance, could be handed over to the Chinese government and set a September 15th deadline for the app to be sold to a U.S. company or risk being banned. Who would be affected by such a move? We looked into the data to find out.
TikTok has been growing at a faster rate than any other social media app. By the end of 2019, they had over 1.5 billion downloads.
TikTok has over 800 million monthly active users outside of China, with 25% in India (which recently banned the app) and 5.6% from the U.S. Douyin, the Chinese version of the app, has 474.7 million users. Facebook, for comparison, has 2.6 billion monthly active users.
While China has a third of the total TikTok and Douyin users, they make up 80% of the time spent on the apps. Before the app was banned, Indians spent as much time on TikTok as the rest of the world combined.
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