In China, a sister app of TikTok is empowering consumers

Chinese people are increasingly using TikTok’s sister app as a way to complain about products and are finding it a powerful asset.

Our research shows that Douyin, which is produced by ByteDance the same company that owns TikTok, has become influential in offering Chinese people a way of putting consumer pressure on companies.

This short-video platform has the largest number of users in China (over 730 million at the end of 2022). 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 app. 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 June 1, 2017.

For our research, we interviewed 56 people living in mainland China who were familiar with online consumer protests. We also followed an online protest and tracked relevant hashtags to gather more information, searching specific Chinese words on Douyin, such as “xiaofeizhe” (consumer; 消费者), “weiquan” (safeguard legal rights; 维权), “jianshang” (profiteer; 奸商).

Over half of our interviewees believed that speaking out about unsatisfactory consumer experiences through media, especially social media, was the only way to...

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