This analysis examines TikTok's global rise, highlighting its technological and postcolonial implications.
This study employs a postcolonial technoscience framework to examine TikTok’s evolution from its origins in China to its global prominence. It identifies three critical phases in TikTok’s journey within a historical and technical foundation of mobile communication technologies: the establishment of ByteDance through Western app mimicry to enhance its innovations, the role of parallel platformization and platform glocalization in fostering a hybridity of TikTok, and the rising tensions due to ambivalence around TikTok amid growing techno-nationalism. By showing the complexity of TikTok’s rise as the result of a shifting global technological order in which non-Western platforms challenge conventional dominance, this article presents an alternative narrative of platform globalization, aligned with postcolonial technoscience, and contributes to a nuanced understanding of the global digital platform ecosystem and the dynamics of technology power.
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Liu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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