Chinese Social Media Apps & International eDiscovery
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Litigators these days must understand social media, and no understanding of social media today is complete without an understanding of how they work on the international stage. The world is increasingly connected across borders, but the way data crosses borders is governed by a complex and interdependent set of legal and technical processes that all lawyers – especially those within multinational organizations or whose clients are multinational organizations – would do well to understand more deeply.
China, in particular, serves as an instructive example of how one country’s laws can govern how users interact with ordinary social media applications (apps), where the data they upload and view on said apps reside, and where and how that data can be viewed (or reviewed, as in the case of electronic discovery for litigation or regulatory inquiry).
TikTok, Douyin, and International Law: The Social Media Platform at the Center of It All
TikTok, the Chinese video-sharing social networking service owned by Beijing-based internet technology company ByteDance, is used to create short dance, lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos and has quickly risen to prominence since its launch outside of China in 2017. In just a few years, it has become one of the world’s most downloaded apps, topping the Google and Apple charts in 2021 with more than 650 million downloads.
Just one week after the new Hong Kong national security law officially took effect, ByteDance stopped operations of the TikTok App in Hong Kong, pulling the app from mobile Hong Kong stores.
Does This Mean TikTok Is Gone from Hong Kong?
The answer is no. TikTok has a twin version in Mainland China called Douyin. The CEO from ByteDance said: “Douyin has lots of users in Hong Kong and will continue to serve the users there.” Also, if users change your iTunes account region to Mainland China, you can use Douyin in Hong Kong.
Corporate litigators, compliance officers, and privacy professionals must understand the nuances of swiftly evolving social media whenever conducting discovery across borders.
Is There Any Functional Difference between TikTok and Douyin?
Yes, even though they share a lot of functions on creating and editing short videos, as well as livestreams, there are some differences. For example, Douyin launched an in-video search function, which was not available on TikTok. This function allows users to highlight an object within a video and perform a search for that item. Similarly, this feature also works for searching people’s faces within a video, which has been the subject of many debates about online and offline privacy.
Corporate litigators, corporate compliance officers, and privacy professionals must understand these nuances whenever conducting data discovery across borders in order to be prepared for handling unique image and video data types that may be present in a given data set for processing. It’s important to be equipped to handle these specialized data types if and when they come up.
What Are the Differences between WeChat and Weixin?
Similar to Douyin and TikTok, the “Super App” WeChat also has a mainland-China based version called Weixin. Many people may think they are the same, but they are not entirely so. For example, WeChat and Weixin use different servers. Thus, the data of official accounts on WeChat and Weixin are stored in different places.
The biggest difference is their “Wallet” system: WeChat and Weixin depend on different third-party payment systems. Even though WeChat Pay HK was launched in 2016, it is still not as popular as in Mainland China. Also, with the exception of Hong Kong, Malaysia, and South Africa, other WeChat overseas users don’t have the wallet function shown in the WeChat interface.
Social Media and International eDiscovery
While TikTok’s withdrawal from Hong Kong raises a lot of questions about social media platforms in Hong Kong, Hong Kong remains an important financial gateway for China to connect the rest of the world, so it’s still too soon to tell what the implications will be for international data transfer and legal operations in the region.
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