TikTok, currently the hottest social media app in the world, welcomed the new year this week by publishing its First Transparency Report as it faces increasing scrutiny from regulators around the world.
The report, which arrived weeks after it hit a group of corporate lawyers to review its policy of content moderation, is widely viewed as the effort of the short video app to calm the U.S. government.
The U.S. Foreign Investment Committee, or CFIUS, is currently conducting a probe into the proposal for possible national security risks.
TikTok is owned by Beijing-based tech upstart ByteDance and has gained rapid prominence away from its home turf, especially in the United States and India.
According to data analytics company Sensor Tower, as of November, TikTok had reported a total of 1.5 billion installations on iOS and Android gadgets, although it is unclear how many converted into active accounts.
The transparency report shows the number of requests that TikTok got during the first six months of 2019 from local regulators.
Some directives include demands from the government to access user information and remove content from the website. India emerged top on the list with 107 total requests sent, followed by the US with 79 requests and Japan with 35.
The figures immediately sparked discussion among the list of countries that had submitted applications about China's visible absence.
This could be because TikTok operates in China as a separate app named Douyin, where it reported that as of last July it had more than 320 million daily active users.
TikTok has taken multiple measures to alleviate concerns about the international markets where it operates, saying that it stores user data in the US and that the company would not take down videos even at the instruction of Beijing's regulators.
It remains to be seen whether critics are being led on these claims. In the meantime, one should not ignore China's major tech's widespread practice of self-censorship.
According to a source working for a Chinese video streaming firm, China's online companies know so well where the government's "red line" is that their self-regulation could be even more stringent than what the government actually imposes, "It's unlikely for the TikTok report to display China's zero requests," the source disclosed.
Meanwhile, the US Army recently prohibited its servicemen from using TikTok because they find it as "a security threat", Military.com reported. "It's a cyber threat and we won't allow it to be installed on government phones," Lt. Col. Robin Ochoa, US Army spokesperson, told Military.com.
