Chinese people are increasingly using TikTok’s sister app Douyin as a way to complain about products. Douyin, which is produced by TikTok’s owner ByteDance, has become influential in offering Chinese people a way of putting consumer pressure on companies.
Short-video platform Douyin had the largest number of users, over 730 million, at the end of last year in China. According to Douyin, its users range from teachers based in rural China who record the impoverished living conditions that many local children face to laid-off Chinese workers making a living live streaming.
Douyin and TikTok are essentially the same application. They allow users to create, share, and view short videos. However, they operate on different servers to comply with China’s internet laws, such as the cybersecurity law, which came into effect on 1 June 2017.
Douyin offers a platform for consumer activism using naoda, which refers to Chinese consumers’ strategic practices to achieve greater public visibility of their complaints. Bringing attention and visibility to a problem makes it more likely a company will respond.
In China, consumers are likely to use social media platforms such as Sina Weibo (similar to Twitter) to express dissatisfaction with companies and boycott them, because social media allows more freedom of expression.
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