Turning up the heat on TikTok

BY Tim Burrowes

March 23, 2023 9:06

Welcome to a Friday edition of Unmade. Today the temperature rises for TikTok, plus details of how the Unmade Index outgunned the wider ASX yesterday.

Only Unmade’s paying members get access to all of our archive, which goes behind the paywall after two months.

TikTok clock ticks

If it wasn’t for the fact that TikTok is eating their breakfast, lunch and dinner, the people at Meta would probably be grateful for its existence. These days, most of the political heat is on TikTok.

This morning, Australian time, the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chew, testified before US Congress for the first time, getting a hostile reception from the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

All those questions that Meta’s Instagram and Facebook used to get about being a cause of teen suicide and a negative effect on mental health more widely are now being fired at TikTok.

But for TikTok, there’s an extra level of complexity and suspicion. The platform is owned by the Chinese-based ByteDance. Politicians believe that risks the platform being open to governmental interference.

At the end of February the Biden administration in the US told all government staff to remove TikTok from their devices over security concerns. Most Australian government agencies have been issuing similar instructions to their staff.

The risk for ByteDance is that western countries could ban the platform altogether, despite its popularity. This month it revealed it’s now got 150m active users, in America alone. There are less recent numbers for Australia, but it’s likely approaching 10m users locally – certainly more than 7m.

The company has already had one narrow escape. During his final months as US President, Donald Trump gave an executive order banning TikTok from the app stores. TikTok lobbied and went to court, and managed to hold off the ban until Joe Biden took office and eventually revoked the executive order in June last year.

But that fight isn’t over.

TikTok is now lobbying across the world. Those newspaper ads you’re seeing here in Australia spruiking TikTok aren’t just a marketing push to promote it as an advertising platform contributing to the economy. It’s part of a much wider play to position it as a good citizen.

TikTok is promoting itself as a marketing platform

The marketing money is being splashed around. Last month TikTok launched a campaign for Matildas players to talk up its “safety features”.

Similarly, there’ll be a lot of warm PR in the coming months.

Today, the AFR’s Boss section has given a full page to a generous profile of the company’s chief operating officer V Pappas, under the headline “V is for Vision”.

TikTok making the interview available at this moment is no coincidence. The TikTok spin has only just begun.

Green day at SCA

The Unmade Index moved upwards for a second day on Thursday, rising by 0.49%, despite the wider ASX heading downwards.

The biggest mover on a relatively subdued day was Southern Cross Austereo, rising by 2.33% to 88c. On Monday, the company hit the lowest share price in its history.

SCA’s closest rival HT&E followed it upwards, rising by 1.93%, while Nine was up by 1.57%.