Why Tiktok is selling Spinach in China and Opium in the West.

Tiktok is the Western version of a Chinese service called Douyin (that’s why the Tiktok logo sports a d!). UI & UX of those two services are pretty similar, but what is different is the content: Douyin has lots of really cool and often interesting, educational content (mixed with a bit of propaganda, of course), while Tiktok is full of trivial stuff — twerking teens and hustling influencers.

In last week’s episode of 60minutes Tristan Harris (an American technology ethicist) explained that kids in China tend to get educated by Douyin, while our kids here in the West get hooked by Tiktok and then sold off as ad reach. According to him, Bytedance, the company behind TikTok and Douyin, is selling the same service in China as the “spinach version”, while we in the West get the “Opium version“ — wow, that sounds really bad, doesn't it?

Of course, everything he says is absolutely correct — and tragic! But TikTok is not a Chinese conspiracy to sell digital opium to our kids. (Btw, I wonder whether Tristan Harris gets the irony of the “Opium angle” in this context…?)

The sad truth is: TikTok is just mimicking what social media in the West looks like. Instagram, Youtube, and Facebook all have the same toxic business model: Maximizing reach to maximize ad revenue. Social media in the West is hooked on advertising, and there is no plan B. Meta tried e-commerce with live shopping — and failed. Elon Musk is trying to sell blue check marks for US$8 a month — but nobody seems to be buying. Google never really tried to diversify. Most of the Western Internet still is a one-trick pony. Good luck pushing educational content on a service built on such a model.

That’s different in China, where all social media services have various revenue streams; often, advertising is not that important. And the difference in business models also means different user experiences: where Instagram and Youtube only care about reach, a video portal like Bilibili thrives on a healthy community with positive dialogues. Spewing hate would be bad for business.

So, we probably shouldn’t blame the Chinese for not selling the spinach version in a part of the digital world that is powered by a hate-industrial complex. Tiktok didn’t start selling digital opium to our kids. We did this ourselves. They are just along for the ride.

And if we don't like what TikTok is doing, maybe we should stop complaining and start learning from them how to make money by selling spinach?