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TikTok ban unleashes new threats
This has been a long and noisy day. Countless articles captured TikTok’s self-selection to “go dark” late Saturday evening before being restored mid Sunday afternoon. Between times, we confirmed that VPNs could not beat the ban and that U.S. accounts could not be accessed from anywhere. TikTok is not in the clear yet — this is a firebreak to enable the platform to find an acceptable U.S. suitor or partner, it is not a remission. And in the midst of this noisy day, some alarming data has been dropped into the mix, suggesting the threat to iPhone and Android users is much worse than most users realize.
The data comes courtesy of Cloudflare, whose technologies underpin enough of the internet’s security services for it to measure trends and changes on a huge scale. In the wake of TikTok taking its U.S. platform offline, Cloudflare says “our data showed a clear impact starting after 03:30 UTC (10:30 PM ET on January 18, 2025),” the moment TikTok went dark.
From that time, Cloudflare says, there was a huge hit to DNS traffic to TikTok-related domains. “This includes DNS traffic not only for TikTok, but also for other ByteDance-owned platforms, such as the CapCut video editor. Traffic dropped by as much as 85% compared to the previous week and showed signs of further decline in the following hours.” The data also showed that “traffic from TikTok owner ByteDance’s network (AS396986) in the US to Cloudflare experienced a sharp decline, dropping by as much as 95% after 03:30 UTC (22:30 ET).”
No surprises there, we expected as much given 170 million American TikTok users were suddenly cut loose. What’s more surprising is that “DNS traffic for TikTok alternatives, driven by RedNote, has been growing in the last few days, and not only in the U.S.” This is the network effect: when American users are forced to switch, they create a global trend.
Surge in traffic to TikTok alternatives — including Chinese apps
When that trend becomes viral, it becomes difficult to stop. “Daily DNS traffic in the U.S. for TikTok alternatives has increased since January 13, reaching as much as 116% growth on January 15 [and] January 19 is on track to surpass that growth,” Cloudflare confirms. But the company also says that “other countries where we observed a clear increase in daily DNS traffic to TikTok alternatives were Mexico (a 500% increase on January 18), Canada (68% on January 18), the UK (53% on January 18), Germany (110% on January 18), and France (75% on January 18).”
Cloudflare says that “those trends are consistent with apps like RedNote rising on top of the Android and iOS App Stores.” This followed the other trend making its own headlines as the TikTok ban become more real, with “TikTok refugees” flocking to other Chinese apps. There have been some interesting social experiments — American and Chinese users chatting, for example, or posts suggesting users test what kind of Chinese political content might trigger a ban from the other platforms. But the bigger story is the frying pan into fire aspect of all this — security and privacy.
TikTok is a security and privacy risk, as are all social media platforms. And user data allegedly heading to China — as is making news in Europe again this week, despite TikTok’s denials — adds some spice. But Chinese platforms that have not been scrubbed at all represent a much greater threat to all those iPhone and Android users jumping in.
“I’m concerned that Americans are flocking to a number of adversary-owned social media platforms,” U.S. Senator Mark Warner posted to Bluesky. “We still need a comprehensive and risk-based approach to assessing and mitigating the risks of foreign-owned apps.” And whatever the reality, the lack of transparency and scrutiny is undeniably true.
Was this accelerating viral migration part of the thinking behind the shortness in TikTok’s shutdown, notwithstanding that the platform didn’t really need to go dark and could have simply awaited the change in administration? We don’t know.
What we do know is that you should not install and use Chinese social media apps thinking that they are the obvious TikTok replacement. They are not. These Chinese-based apps don’t have the protections that even TikTok has added to its platform, and there is not the oversight — again, real or over-egged — that TikTok has been pushed to put in place. You need to be very careful before you allow the apps onto your phone and with the permissions you grant them.
My expectation is that TikTok’s shutdown won’t happen again, all the ingredients are now in place for a neat fudge. But whatever happens, don’t forget that privacy and security threats are very real on your phone — whatever its flavor. And don’t take any of these expedient risks simply because flocks of others are doing the same.
