Borderline practices on Douyin/TikTok: Content transfer and algorithmic manipulation

Abstract

TikTok continues to be the top downloaded app in many countries around the world as the short video consumption craze continues. But TikTok has also come under harsh scrutiny for its Chinese origins and data security. For TikTok, the journey of globalization has involved a painful contest with governments, geopolitical manoeuvrers, and, ultimately, finding platform regulation loopholes. TikTok’s sister app, Douyin, shares identical digital architectures, but follows different trajectories of development in China. Through interviews with Chinese influencers and media practitioners, along with a content analysis of policy documents and industry reports, this paper identifies and analyzes the borderline practices that have occurred on Douyin – including content transfers, and algorithmic platformization – and evaluates the potential for these practices to be replicated on TikTok.

Contesting the intermediary power: How Chinese MCNs interact with platforms, creators, and advertisers

“…The YouTube-MCN partnership is not the only business model for MCNs in the world. MCNs in China co-evolved with the emergence of live-streaming and short video platforms (Su and Kaye, 2023). Content platforms have aspired to become infrastructures for cultural production, e-commerce, and even social governance, a concept that emphasizes governing society through a multi-layered instead of a top-down approach (Wang and Lobato, 2019).…”