China’s TikTok is here to take on Facebook – The Wall Street Journal

So far, China has struggled to break into social media outside of China. And, while US social media companies dominate globally, they have never managed to break into China (because they're basically illegal thanks to China's strict internet rules). But TikTok may be changing that – it's the first Chinese social app that has captured the attention and eyeballs of Westerners. Interestingly, it has done so by spending billions to advertise on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and the like. Inevitably, there are now rising concerns about what the Chinese owners of TikTok may do with the personal information of their users. After all, it's not like the EU or US can force them to obey Western rules for data protection (such as they are). Sounds like a new front in the growing confrontation between US and Chinese interests. – Felicity Duncan

TikTok's Videos Are Goofy. Its Strategy to Dominate Social Media Is Serious

By Georgia Wells and Yang Jie in San Francisco and Yoko Kubota in Beijing

(The Wall Street Journal) Sometime in 2018, executives at Snap Inc. realized their biggest advertiser was also a rising competitor. It was an addictive app featuring cat videos, pranks and people doing robot dances. The Chinese video-sharing app TikTok was splurging by spending nearly $1 billion on advertising for the year, according to a person familiar with the spending, helping turn it into the first ever Chinese consumer-tech company to break out big in the U.S.

___STEADY_PAYWALL___