- China has built an Internet parallel to our Internet with applications copied to sites like YouTube and Twitter. However, as Chinese apps like TikTok become popular, Silicon Valley companies are now looking to China for new ideas.
- Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked about the risks of Chinese apps becoming popular, but he is now pulling a page out of China and stealing his ideas.
- The counterfeiting, carbon copy and cheaper counterfeiting mindset that typified China’s industry and spurred its initial development of social media, reached the West – and it looks a lot like Facebook.
- Chris Stokel-Walker is a freelance journalist and author of “YouTubers: How YouTube shook TV 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 the Business Insider home page for more stories.
If you manage to sneak behind the ‘Great Firewall’ that surrounds China’s Internet, you are faced with a strangely familiar environment. The Chinese internet is similar – if not more developed – than the rest of the world. But there are some important differences.
You won’t find YouTube – at least unofficially, although virtual private networks (VPNs) allow people in China to access it – but you will find a number of local competitors who look terribly like the world’s largest video sharing site. You won’t find Twitter, but you will find Weibo, which is similar.
A parallel internet was generated from China’s unique social and political demands, but it raised key concepts and stole ideas from the first Silicon Valley social media giants.
It is not just the applications and services that are subject to full copying; since Western companies moved their production lines to China in the 1980s and 1990s, China became the place to buy counterfeit goods. It is estimated that 80% of all counterfeit products worldwide come from China. Now, in the 2020s, the tide has turned. In the world of technology, at least, we are copying China.
Times have changed
Today we are seeing the emergence of the first generation of applications developed outside of Silicon Valley to really become popular, led by TikTok – which maps its genesis into two different applications, Musical.ly (an American company run by Chinese executives) and Douyin ( that has its feet firmly inside the ‘Great Firewall’ since its foundation). This shift worried the old guard of the tech brothers in Silicon Valley – and Hawkish politicians concerned about the geopolitical implications of giving up Internet control to China.
Mark Zuckerberg is the main one. Recordings of internal meetings made public in October 2019 indicate that he is very aware of the risks to his set of companies by Asian startups.
“One of the things that is especially notable about TikTok is, for a time, the internet landscape was a kind of bunch of internet companies that were mostly American,” said Zuckerberg to his employees. “And there was this parallel universe of Chinese companies that practically only offered their services in China. TikTok, which is built by this Beijing ByteDance company, is actually the first consumer Internet product built by one of the Chinese tech giants that is going very well around the world. “
Zuckerberg called this “an interesting phenomenon”. And, to avoid it, he decided to take a page from China’s books, shamelessly imitating the most popular products produced by Facebook’s competitors and passing them off as his own.
Facebook mimicry is increasing
This is nothing new, of course. At antitrust hearings held in late 2020, emails among Instagram’s co-founders revealed that they were under the impression that if they didn’t sell to Zuckerberg, his company would simply copy the idea anyway – what they considered “a way of undoing”. As part of the same audience, Zuckerberg was forced to admit that Facebook “has certainly adapted features that others have introduced”.
But Facebook mimicry is becoming more frequent – and along with that, more striking. Earlier this year, she launched Reels, her Instagram that looked a lot like TikTok. This was Facebook’s second attempt in the past 12 months to displace TikTok, which has largely rewritten the rules of social media and short online videos. An earlier attempt, called Lasso, was closed in July 2020 after barely making a mark in the world.
To avoid the popularity of platforms like Cameo, which allows celebrities to sell access to their personal lives by providing short clips of video in exchange for fan money, Facebook has started to develop Super, which shares many of the same resources.
News of the Super’s existence was confirmed by a Facebook spokesman shortly before Christmas. At the same time, Facebook’s chief technology officer unveiled TLDR, an AI assistant tool designed to summarize articles in more condensed formats. It has more than a passing resemblance to any number of apps, including Summly, a startup launched in early 2010 by a British teenager named Nick D’Aloisio.
In search of the superapp
Distortion of resources and direct copying of ideas are not exclusive to Facebook. As previously reported, the spread of impermanent virus-like content from Snapchat to Twitter, via Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube, demonstrates that unique features are becoming rarer. Each application seeks to become the same. But few do it as blatantly as Facebook.
In part, this is due to their power: they are preparing to become a super-application, a one-stop shop for users to remain in the Facebook ecosystem. But it’s also because that position at the top of the social media pyramid allows them to be more blatant in choosing competitors and in deciding to raise the main selling points of opponents at wholesale, if they refuse to accept Facebook money for a purchase.
Still, it is hypocritical for Facebook – and Zuckerberg – to do that, especially considering the way they seem to have generated opposition to the emergence of apps like TikTok earlier this year. Part of the reason the outgoing US president sought revenge against TikTok in the courts – a revenge he will likely lose or run out of time before being replaced by President-elect Joe Biden – due to the alarm raised by people like Zuckerberg . Politicians, Zuckerberg told an audience at Georgetown University in October 2019, face a decision on “which nation’s values will determine what speech will be allowed in the coming decades”.
Zuckerberg was ostensibly talking about issues of censorship and oversight – areas where China fails and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Speaking of the rise of China-based applications and services worldwide, he asked the audience, “Is this the Internet we want?”
What he didn’t realize is that in a way we already have a Chinese internet – and it’s because of him. The counterfeiting, carbon copy and cheaper counterfeiting mindset that typified China’s industry and spurred its initial development of social media, reached the West – and it looks a lot like Facebook.