As pandemic fears rise and millions are stuck indoors, major Hollywood celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, 50, have taken to posting their own all-singing, all-dancing videos, which then go viral on other media platforms.

But to some, the growth of TikTok is far from benign.

Privacy advocates and several US congressmen want to rein in the app over concerns it may censor and monitor content for the Chinese government, and be used for misinformation and election interference. This despite the fact that TikTok keeps its servers outside China and swears it will not hand over user data.

Are these fears justified – or fuelled by political and anticompetitive motives?

But Eric Harwit, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, does not buy such arguments against TikTok, especially given that 60 per cent of its US users are aged 16 to 24.

“ByteDance has done a pretty good job of having a firewall between TikTok and the Chinese version of it, Douyin.

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“Also, many users in the US are teens and they’re not a particularly useful source of national security information.

“So I’d say the concerns are motivated more by a general fear of any kind of Chinese telecommunication application rather than actual attempts to siphon off valuable US intelligence information.

“And Facebook and other American companies have similar products,” Harwit points out. “US government officials will always want to protect American commercial interests.”

Sarah Cook, a China analyst for Freedom House – the US government-funded think tank – disagrees.

Chinese officials, she argues, have shown a willingness to censor and manipulate information well beyond their country’s borders – for instance, regarding the scale of the initial outbreak in Wuhan, an obfuscation that may have exacerbated its impact abroad.

“For those who think Chinese government censorship is only Chinese people’s problem, this pandemic shows how much that’s not the case.

“And even if it’s not happening right now with TikTok, the concern is that Chinese companies are beholden to their government, whether they want to be or not.

“I’m not saying block TikTok entirely,” she says. “It’s a question of looking at it in a democratic system and deciding on reasonable oversight and safeguards to protect users and information flows when that time comes.”

When it comes to expanding China’s cultural influence, though, neither Cook nor Harwit believes the app is especially effective.

So says Morten Bay, a lecturer in digital and social media at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

“A semi-Western culture, with small variations of local culture, is becoming the norm on social media. And Chinese soft power is difficult to assert because there’s no value difference.”

And even if Chinese tech companies keep taking bigger bites of the Western market, he is sceptical of China’s “ability to leverage that for soft power in a geopolitical sense”.

“Because there is a very big apparatus pushing against China in that regard. As soon as TikTok started gaining traction in the US, people came out against it, trying to make everyone aware of the privacy and geopolitical issues.

“So China faces a lot of resistance,” Bay concludes. “And I’m not sure a social media platform on its own can do much about that.”

Still, if you had to back a horse in this race, TikTok would be it, says Zhang Mengmeng.

When she and her colleagues from global industry analysis firm Counterpoint Research visited the company, they were impressed by its research and development capabilities.

“Because they’re a very young company, their pace for incubating new projects is a lot faster, especially compared to successful but older internet companies in China which have been around for 15 to 20 years.

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“They have lots of little start-up projects within the company and their organisational structure is very flat – it doesn’t matter what your age is, if you have a good idea, you get promoted very quickly.”

“Before, the US was more advanced in terms of internet development and China seemed to just copy its new ideas. Now, this is reversing. There are so many people in China using the internet that start-ups there can test ideas very easily.

“So now it seems like a lot of US companies are trying to see what ideas are coming out of China.” ■