Inside WeChat’s Struggle to Slow Down TikTok Owner ByteDance

A cartoon pig raps about the misery of job hunting during the pandemic. Another clip says a shortage of office toilet paper is a sign of a failing company. Both bite-size videos were posted online by Xiao Yang as part of his job marketing a company that sells online career services in China. His videos do pretty well on Douyin, a Chinese viral video app run by ByteDance, best known in the West as the owner of TikTok. Xiao’s top video on Douyin has 28,000 likes.

He also adds his videos to WeChat, China’s omnipresent social app, which has a section for sharing videos. But judging by the reaction to Xiao’s clips, WeChat isn’t the place to go for videos despite having a billion daily active users. Xiao’s best video there has just 27 likes.