Popular social media platform TikTok has announced that it will be leaving Hong-Kong. This is according to what a spokesperson of the company told Reuters on Monday.
The platform which is owned by China-based ByteDance made this move as a result of Hong-Kong’s decision to uphold China’s Draconian Law. This law gives China a supreme hand over every content in the country in terms of censorship.
This move is without a doubt a tough one for the company, according to a recent analytics report by Sensor Tower, they have attracted close to 150,000 downloads from Hong-Kong and over 2 billion worldwide. Regardless, it is a crucial and necessary move based on the fact that they have been accused repeatedly of data theft, security and privacy policy issues.
TikTok isn’t the first big social media platform to stop doing business with Hong-Kong. Facebook and Google no longer process government requests for user data in the region. A latest Chinese law forces every company operating in the country to provide user data to the government. Twitter has also raised concerns against the national security legislation over there citing if the country still has extreme supremacy over its online and public spheres.
In order to appeal to the global audience, TikTok was designed in a way that it could not be accessed by mainland China. The strategy definitely panned out well, as the platform is very well known in the global market. And it is in the company’s best interest to continue to appease the global market.
