US-China Digital Diplomacy: TikTok dethrones google and facebook, as the most visited in 2021!

In 2020, TikTok was only ranked #7; in the last 15 years, Google was the undisputed most visited domain. Facebook also lost its number one position for the first time to TikTok. Apparently, how people use the Internet and what people do online are vastly changing, hence countries are getting entangled in digital diplomatic power play.

Digital diplomacy has evolved from focus on soft and sharp power contestations to diffusion of positive messages about a given State and projection of negative digital contents intended to manipulate how global audience perceive the targeted State, to the current stage where AI and big data platforms and tools are being instrumentalized for the propagation and actualization of State's interest. Hashtag tracking, network analysis, sentiment analysis, and opinion mining have become instruments of digital diplomacy.

It was the concerns over how big data being warehoused by social media platforms that inspired ex-President Mr. Trump to ban (unsuccessful) TikTok in the US in 2020, President Joe Biden has reversed the ban. It was reasoned that the Chinese government might access data collected by ByteDance through its TikTok app. TikTok responded that users' data is stored in the US and backup in Singapore. It refuted the claim that it could give the Chinese government access to users' data. In the same vein, the Indian Government has banned TikTok and other Chinese apps. This followed India-China border clashes - geopolitical feud turned to cyberwar. Before TikTok was blocked in India, as of mid-2020, India was its largest overseas market. Currently, TikTok is used by about 80 million Americans every month.

As more people globally spend more time on the Internet to: connect, socialize, work, learn, earn, transact business, entertain and get entertained, the questions of who owns, manages, and controls the platform have become cybersecurity concerns. This is because Internet enabled platforms have transnational reach. To be sure, social media is the biggest, cheapest and the most accessible media on earth. The 'soft' power of platform owners was demonstrated when the former President of the US was deplatformed by both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter also exercised soft power when Nigeria's President Mohammudu Buhari's tweet was deleted; the Nigerian state responded with a 'sharp' power by suspending operations on Twitter on Nigerian cyberspace. Since the suspension, some Nigerians are now accessing Twitter via transnational cyberspace enabled by VPN.

Essentially, TikTok has been able to appeal to younger social media users, its in-built videos editing and lip-synching tools are tantalizingly irresistible. User experience is the most important factor that drove TikTok to the top, unlike shared Facebook videos that can only be watched on the app or web. TikTok allows its shared videos to be watched outside its platform, most of its videos are easily downloadable directly to your phone and shareable to other platforms seamlessly. TikTok being a video-centric platform, has no room for text-based or image contents.

Though YouTube has integrated TikTok-like videos creation format into its platform (#Short); shared video can only be watched on YouTube.com. Shareability of TikTok videos across all other social media platforms is its greatest strength! In Cyberspace no champion reigns forever, in some months both Google and Facebook could take over their leading positions. In terms of profit, TikTok isn't making much profit anywhere close to either Google and Facebook.

Though TikTok claims to be apolitical, going by a recent post by its CEO, Kevin Mayer, he said: "We are not political, we do not accept political advertising and have no agenda - our only objective is to remain a vibrant, dynamic platform for everyone to enjoy,". At any rate, the role which TikTok, Google and Facebook would play in US-China digital diplomacy in 2022 hangs in conjectural dialects. In conclusion, let's take a look at the of list top ten most visited domains and social media sites in 2021 as ranked by Cloudflare:

Top 10 — Most popular domains (late) 2021

1 TikTok.com

2 Google.com

3 Facebook.com

4 Microsoft.com

5 Apple.com

6 Amazon.com

7 Netflix.com

8 YouTube.com

9 Twitter.com

10 WhatsApp.com

The top 10 — Most popular social media domains (late) 2021