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ByteDance & TikTok

From the series The telecommunications battle

Imagine that a full-screen video turns your phone into a window. You can see a vast world through this window. Douyin is a projection of this colourful world. Douyin is the Chinese version of TikTok, and these words were spoken by Zhang Yiming, founder of ByteDance, the Beijing-based parent company of both applications. Matthew Brennan notes this in his book Attention Factory: The Story of TikTok &ersand; China's ByteDance. The front page of the ByteDance website reads: Our Mission: Inspire Creativity, Enrich Life.

A colourful and fun world, built on short videos, is also capable of generating major business. It is estimated that global users have exceeded two billion in total, mostly very young people. ByteDance is not yet listed, and its revenue is estimated by analysts based on internal company documents; 75% of it is generated in China, thanks to advertising, e-commerce, and user interaction. The company has now reached the size of the US giant Meta and surpassed its compatriots Alibaba and Tencent. In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the group has launched the Doubao chatbot, which today, with over 200 million monthly users, is the leading one in China and was the exclusive partner for the Chinese New Year celebrations on State TV. ByteDance says it has 150,000 employees spread across 120 cities worldwide. We are facing a phenomenon that takes on political, economic, and social characteristics, which warrant further analysis.

The European inquiry

The European Commission has just concluded a two-year investigation and issued an initial preliminary ruling against TikTok: the Chinese app violates the rules of the Digital Services Act because it creates mechanisms of user addiction. With its personalised recommendation system, it produces an autopilot effect of endless scrolling through images and videos, an addiction that can have detrimental effects on the developing minds of children and teens.

Some European countries, including France, Spain, and the United Kingdom, are preparing laws that will ban under-16s from accessing social networks. The Economist is sceptical: Let Them Scroll headlines a cover editorial, restrictions would do more harm than good. But French President Emmanuel Macron and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez support the proposals, which affect a sector where there is no strong European presence. Knowing this weakness, the French President declared: The brains of our children and adolescents are not for sale. Their emotions are not for sale or to be manipulated, whether by American platforms or Chinese algorithms. Obviously, he did so by communicating on the US platform X.

Digital drug

In the US, where TikTok has 200 million users, an agreement has just been concluded that closes six years of litigation. A bipartisan law required TikTok to sell its business to a US company to prevent sensitive citizen data from ending up in the hands of Beijing. Donald Trump, who at the end of his first term was in favour of shutting down the platform, became convinced that it had helped him in his subsequent victory, so he postponed the law's deadline until the current solution was reached. American TikTok will end up 80% owned by a coalition led by Oracle and the data will be managed by its data centres. The remaining 20% will stay with ByteDance, which retains ownership of the algorithm, licensing it to its US partners.

Trump wrote on Truth Social: I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok! It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important voice.

Individual capitalists are only concerned with their immediate profit, as we have written many times before in this newspaper; everything else is of little importance to them. In the case of ByteDance, we are witnessing the scientific study of entertainment linked to widespread social narcissism, solely for the purpose of making money.

Nothing Chinese can be found on TikTok, writes Giuseppe De Ruvo in the December 2025 issue of Limes, what can be found is a very American kind of loneliness [...], the commodifying hedonism of urban life, or despair from excessive scrolling. But Beijing politicians, who impose content and duration limits on Douyin, may believe that stressing the current trend of US (non-) culture could accelerate the collapse of the US or at least promote its substantial weakening [...] self-consumption of the enemy, digital Fentanyl.

Three profiles and a lot of calculation

ByteDance was founded in 2012. Among its first investors was the American fund Susquehanna International Group, followed by the New York-based groups General Atlantic, Tiger Global, and KKR; today these companies hold the majority of its shares. The company's first successful app was Jinri Toutiao, or Today's Headlines, a selection of short news. Douyin was launched in 2016, followed a year later by the international version TikTok, initially designed for the Japanese and Southeast Asian markets. At the end of 2017, ByteDance beat the competition from Facebook, Tencent, and Snapchat, and acquired, for about $1 billion, Musical.ly. This startup, founded by two Chinese IT specialists, became famous in the US and immediately merged with TikTok.

The founders of ByteDance had an idea that they had pursued since the early days of Jinri Toutiao, later systematically implemented with TikTok. It was necessary to provide each user with a personalised menu, and to build recommendations for news and videos to follow, in order to increase engagement duration.

In January 2018 – Brennan writes in his book – ByteDance held a meeting in Beijing where they outlined how their algorithm worked. The report was by software architect Cao Huanhuan, who explained: there are three profiles to follow, namely content, user, and environment. The content profile assigns a value ranking to every word used, or to every dance move, beat, and music track. The user profile collects the person's history: what they search for online, the device used, their residence, age, gender, and behavioural traits (whether they read carefully or hastily, for example). The environmental profile contains information on the place where consumption occurs (work, home, gardens, subway) and the network performance in each of these situations. It is through the use of these data, and probably based on responses to the inputs sent (tested millions of times), that the recommendation is created, which chains individuals to the smartphone display. Little imagination, one might say, and a lot of calculation.

Filters, interests, and competition

Videos and music are obviously at the heart of TikTok's success because they are common passions among young people, but here too nothing is left to chance. Knowing that young Chinese people were highly sensitive to the personal image they displayed online – writes Brennan – a dedicated engineering team was set up to build best-in-class beautifying filters and special effects for Douyin.

It is a system transferred to TikTok, just like the one that maximises the range of interests that can appear in recommendations. The social media platform offers ideas on travel, cooking, sports, fashion, humour, cosmetics and makeup, pets, gaming, current events, and reading.

A social media platform with millions of users obviously turns into a huge stage on which people try to stand out. TikTok fuels the temptation by organising challenges among young people, who compete in dance, dressing up, singing, and so on. To increase the quality of the challenges, both in China and the US, ByteDance sent its engineers to art schools to scout for brilliant talents, promising them fame through the Internet. Once a young person becomes a performer or influencer, it is very easy for them to also become an online seller of products, thus closing the loop.

A systematic organisation

Despite its generally light-hearted content, ByteDance is one of the Chinese companies accused of following the 9-9-6 rule: working hours from 9am to 9pm, six days a week. It has been able to attract the best IT talents, snatching them from competing groups like Baidu, China's Internet search engine. It has financed campaigns for pre-installing its applications. TikTok has spent more than Coca-Cola and Disney on online advertising on US competitors like Snapchat.

ByteDance was able to capitalise on Chinese development. One of the foundations of Douyin's success was a stable and widespread 4G mobile phone network in the country, which allowed instant video downloads, as well as the low rates offered by State-owned telecom groups.

Kelly Zhang, former head of the Douyin team, states that among the technological factors that have aided the platform's spread is also the growth of domestic smartphone production, which introduced suitable models with high-definition, larger, and foldable screens.

Zhang Yiming says that the origin of the name of the new Chinese champion is a tribute to Steve Jobs, who believed that technology (Byte) and the liberal arts (Dance) should be linked. In any case, Brennan writes that the group's success wasn't born from the vision of an individual; instead, it arose from a systematic process of experimentation within the organisation.

Translated from the original work by , published in Lotta Comunista, , p. 17.

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