- China has built an internet parallel to our internet with copycat programs for people like YouTube and Twitter. However, as Chinese apps like TikTok become mainstream, Silicon Valley companies are now looking to China for new ideas.
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, talked about the risks of Chinese programs flowing mainly, but is now taking a page out of China’s book and stealing their ideas.
- The downturn, carbon copy, cheaper counterfeit mentality that characterized the Chinese industry and spurred the early development of social media came to the West – and it looks a lot like Facebook.
- Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist and author of “YouTubers: How YouTube TV Shook Up and Created a New Generation of Stars”, and the upcoming book “TikTok Boom: China, the US and the Superpower Race for Social Media.”
- This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
If you sneak up behind the ‘Great Firewall’ that surrounds China’s internet, you are confronted with a strange familiar environment. The Chinese internet looks similar – if not more developed – to the rest of the world. But there are some important differences.
You will not find YouTube – at least not officially, although virtual private networks (VPNs) give people in China access to it – but you will find a series of homemade competitors that look awful like the world’s largest video sharing site. You will not find Twitter, but we will find Weibo, which looks similar.
A parallel Internet was generated from China’s unique social and political demands, but it lifted key concepts and stole ideas from Silicon Valley’s early social media giants.
These are not just programs and services that have been copied directly; Since Western companies moved their production lines to China in the 1980s and 1990s, China has become the place to buy discount items. It is estimated that 80% of all counterfeit goods worldwide come from China. Now, in the 2020s, the tide has turned. In the world of technology, we at least copy China.
Times have changed
Today we see the rise of the first generation of apps developed outside of Silicon Valley to make it truly mainstream, led by TikTok – which originated in two different apps, Musical.ly (an American company run by Chinese managers are managed), map. and Douyin (who since his inception has had his feet firmly inside the ‘Great Firewall’). The move has put the old wait of Silicon Valley technology associates – and hawkish politicians concerned about the geopolitical implications of ceding control of the Internet to China -.
Mark Zuckerberg is the head of them. Surveys of internal meetings released in October 2019 indicate that he is well aware of the risks to his range of companies by trainers from Asia.
“One of the things that is particularly striking about TikTok is that for a while, the Internet landscape was a bunch of Internet companies that were primarily U.S. businesses,” Zuckerberg told his employees. “And then there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that only offered their services in China. TikTok, built by Beijing ByteDance, is actually the first consumer Internet product built by one of the Chinese technology giants around the world. do well. ‘
Zuckerberg called it “an interesting phenomenon.” And to try it, he decided to take a page out of China’s books, without embarrassing the most popular products manufactured by Facebook’s competitors and giving it as his own.
Facebook’s imitation increases
This, of course, is nothing new. In antitrust hearings held in late 2020, emails among co-founders of Instagram revealed that they were under the impression that if they did not sell to Zuckerberg, his company would simply copy their idea anyway – which they said ‘Destruction Mode’ was. As part of the same trials, Zuckerberg had to admit that Facebook ‘certainly adapted features that led others’.
But Facebook’s imitation is becoming more frequent – and more blatant. Earlier this year, he released Reels, the Instagram link that looked a lot like TikTok. It was Facebook’s second attempt in the last twelve months to disrupt TikTok, which has largely rewritten the norms of social media and short-form video. A previous effort, called Lasso, was shut down in July 2020 after it barely made a mark on the world.
To prevent the popularity of platforms like Cameo, which allow celebrities to sell access to their personal lives through short video clips in exchange for fans’ cash, Facebook began developing Super, which shares many of the same features.
The news of Super’s existence was confirmed just before Christmas by a Facebook spokesperson. And around the same time, Facebook’s chief technology officer TLDR unveiled a tool for AI assistants designed to summarize articles in more abbreviated formats. It looks more like a transient resemblance to a number of programs, including Summly, a startup launched in the early 2010s by a British teenager named Nick D’Aloisio.
In pursuit of the superapp
Features and direct copying of ideas are not just Facebook’s competence. As previously reported, the virus-like distribution of invalid content from Snapchat to Twitter, via Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, shows that unique features are becoming scarcer. Every app wants to be the same. But few do it as blatantly as Facebook.
In part, it’s because of their power: they want to become a superapp, a one-stop shop for users to stay within the Facebook ecosystem. But it’s also because the position at the top of the social media pyramid enables them to be more blatant in choosing competitors to pick cherries and deciding to lift opponents’ main selling points in wholesale, if they do not Facebook’s do not want to accept money for a buyout.
Yet it is hypocritical of Facebook – and of Zuckerberg – to do so, especially given the way they seem to have faced opposition to the rise of programs like TikTok earlier this year. Part of the reason why the outgoing US president has pursued a vendetta against TikTok through the courts – a vendetta he is likely to lose, or if it runs out of time before being replaced by President-elect Joe Biden – was because of alarm sounded by people like Zuckerberg. Politicians, Zuckerberg told an audience at Georgetown University in October 2019, are facing a decision on “which country’s values will determine which speech will still be allowed for decades.”
Zuckerberg apparently talked about issues of censorship and surveillance – areas that China is failing at, and that should not be repeated elsewhere. He spoke about the rise of Chinese programs and services worldwide and asked the audience, “Is this the Internet we want?”
What he did not realize is that in a way we already have a Chinese internet – and that’s because of him. The downturn, carbon copy, cheaper counterfeit mentality that characterized the Chinese industry and spurred the early development of social media came to the West – and it looks a lot like Facebook.