TikTok superapp war versus Facebook, Instagram, and Amazon
TikTok, the social media app owned by China’s ByteDance, wants all of you. Its latest goal is subsidized e-commerce to outcompete Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Temu, Shein, and other brands with online marketplaces—especially Amazon.
According to Wall Street Journal sources, TikTok will start selling made-in-China goods to U.S. consumers in August. To get there, TikTok is offering suppliers in China free shipping and tax subsidies. Goodbye, mom-and-pop shops on Main Street. Hello, subsidized slave labor from China.
“TikTok Shop” has already launched in other global markets, including Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, and the United Kingdom.
The app, which promotes Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda and suicidal and dangerous challenges among the young, is currently establishing its international settlement and logistics systems to target the United States, including warehouses, after-sale services, and supply-chain management.
Will it also include TikTok trucks racing the ubiquitous Amazon and Uber vehicles clogging our highways? Or TikTok Air, jousting for scarce airport berths with FedEx and UPS?
TikTok could get outsized profits if it achieves the Holy Grail of social networking with a super app, also known as an “everything app.” These apps, like WeChat in China, provide not just microblogging but a total e-commerce, e-banking, e-culture, and e-everything experience.
TikTok Air seems like a no-brainer as a glam marketing addition, even if it has only one plane to fly around its top influencers. This is not advice to TikTok, which is the relatively friendly face of Beijing’s totalitarian state. Nobody should give advice that would empower a dictator, terrorist, murderer, or other threat to our lives and liberties.
Instead, it is a warning to democracies to be on guard against the latest and greatest new types of CCP propaganda. The slicker and more expensive the look, the more likely it has some link to the biggest and fastest-growing authoritarian economy in Asia.
The economic stakes are huge, even without a super app that goes all the way to offering nonstop white-glove influencer flights to Shanghai.
By Anders Corr
