TikTok took first place, although it is still controversial

Despite safety concerns, bullying and child abuse, the Chinese TikTok app is the most popular in its history. She also beat Facebook.

The social space is controlled by TikTok

TikTok is the most downloaded application. This is the basic message and so far the decision of the duel with Facebook in favor of Chinese competition. Statistics published by the Nikkei server for the first time since 2018 showed a defeated Facebook (including Messenger). Thus, in terms of the total download numbers, which were the evaluation criteria for compiling the ranking. TikTok began its journey with a steep rise, gradually defeating Instagram, WhatsApp and now Facebook.

As we have already written, in several cases TikTok could not deal with safety and many incidents, even child bullying, did not seem to bother him very much. He is not bothered by EU law and the rules of our region. However, which is a more strange phenomenon, does not bother users either. Application especially during a pandemic recorded a rocketing growth in its popularity, counted over downloads.

As it turned out with questions from customers, for example, new clips of popular artists were spread through TikTok and it attracted new users. And this makes the obviously unflattering reputation of the application, its creators and the background indifferent. Or they don’t know about it.

Available competition data, such as Facebook and WhatsApp in particular, say that the combination of interaction between the two applications and data sharing has led to an outflow of customers to the competition. And it should be TikTok, which is unexpected when we realize that TikTok is not a model of protection of stored and shared data. The statement of one of the members of the Center for Global Communications (Shinichi Yamaguchi), which is part of the International University of Japan, believes that Data security, data protection and access to personal data in general will be the main criteria in the customer’s decision on which application to choose. This is not yet the case.

For example, it is quite high in the list Telegram, which is an application for secure communication. Although it was created in the past in Russia, where it was based, its move to Germany meant better trust and it is actually the only one in the top ten among the options for exchanging information (not counting Messenger or WhatsApp, which are not classic competition for Telegram). It was very popular during the protests in Hong Kong and Thailand, and the local authorities were unable to break it and infiltrate the protest organization.

It is a paradox that TikTok, with its security problems, occupies the first place, as if its customers simply did not mind, and on the other hand, the Telegram climbs unobtrusively up the ladder, where the protection of personal data and their exchange comes first. Thus, it offers conflicting behaviors and options like TikTok, albeit with a different focus.