TikTok Politics: Tit for Tat on the India–China Cyberspace Frontier

Authors

  • Megha Mishra Deloitte
  • Pu Yan Peking University
  • Ralph Schroeder University of Oxford

Keywords:

TikTok, India, China, geopolitics, cybernationalism

Abstract

TikTok has enjoyed wide popularity in the Global South. But in the summer of 2020, a tit-for-tat altercation erupted over the use of the app in India against the backdrop of a border dispute between India and China. India banned TikTok, along with other Chinese mobile applications. This ban raised larger ongoing issues around user privacy, cybersecurity threats, and content regulation issues on social media platforms and telecommunications equipment around the world. In this article, we explore these issues and the wider debates on social media. To do so, we interviewed policy makers and academics, as well as representatives from India’s technology industry. We also applied computational linguistic analysis to 6,388 Twitter posts about the ban by Indian users. The discourses on Twitter show intense nationalistic rhetoric and that Indian Twitter users were vocal in urging the government to ban TikTok. In-depth expert interviews suggested intense geopolitical conflicts behind the TikTok ban. We situate these findings with a broader analysis of the current geopolitics of social media platforms.

Author Biographies

Megha Mishra, Deloitte

Megha Mishra is a graduate in journalism from the University of Delhi and holds an extensive experience at using digital media for social development. She is looking to build on her work involving online political campaigns, digital literacy and livelihoods. She is currently working at Deloitte, UK.

Pu Yan, Peking University

Pu Yan is an assistant professor at Peking University, China. Her research interests include online information behaviour, digital divides, and the use of digital media in everyday life. She is currently working on the project “What Do ‘the People’ Want? “, which combines traditional social science approaches and computational social science methods to understand the use of digital media and the rise of populism in six countries. Before joining the Oxford Internet Institute, she obtained an undergraduate degree (Honour) in Journalism and Communication from Tsinghua University in 2014, and a master’s degree (Distinction) in Social Science of the Internet from Oxford Internet Institute in 2015.

Ralph Schroeder, University of Oxford

Ralph Schroeder was formerly Professor in the School of Technology Management and Economics at Chalmers University in Gothenburg (Sweden). He completed his PhD about Max Weber at the LSE in 1988. His publications include Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change (Stanford University Press, 2007) and Being There Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments (Oxford University Press, 2010). He is also the author of ‘An Age of Limits: Social Theory for the 21st Century’ (Palgrave Macmillan 2013) and, with Eric T. Meyer, of ‘Knowledge Machines: Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities’ (MIT Press 2015). His most recent book is ‘Social Theory after the Internet‘ and he is also working on big data in the social sciences.

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Published

2022-01-14

Issue

Vol. 16 (2022)

Section

Articles

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