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July 17, 2020

Welcome to this edition of The Reader, a weekly roundup of Fortune stories and insights you need to know.

TikTok has become a geopolitical flashpoint. The app withdrew from Hong Kong in the wake of a new law allowing Beijing influence over data and content. India, citing data security concerns, banned the app. And President Trump is calling for a U.S. ban over similar worries.

Can Trump actually ban TikTok? It's complicated. Meanwhile, Amazon instructed employees to delete TikTok from their phones and then retracted the order. In places where TikTok is currently inaccessible, tech-savvy users are finding workarounds.
 

For in-depth coverage of TikTok's global turbulence, don't miss the reporting of Fortune's Hong Kong team. Sign up to Eastworld, their weekly brief on the biggest stories in and out of Asia. 

Read on for everything you need to know on TikTok. I hope you have a safe and enjoyable weekend.

Clifton Leaf

Editor-in-chief, Fortune

P.S. Speaking of TikTok, you would have learned long ago about how this hot video app beat Twitter at its own game, pushed Facebook to copy it, poached talent from Disney, scared Amazon, spoofed cryptocurrency traders, and became a geopolitical flashpoint…if you’d been reading Fortune. Become a premium member and discover the next viral sensation before everyone else does.

MUST READ

How TikTok became a geopolitical flashpoint

TikTok is by far one of China’s most successful Internet exports, but its high-profile global presence has made it a bugbear for wariness of the Chinese government and a geopolitical hot potato. 

BY NAOMI XU ELEGANT

JULY 10, 2020

MUST WATCH

Eastworld Spotlight: Hong Kong national security bill explained

And what a U.S./China relationship could look like moving forward.

Here's a peek at Fortune Analytics, our exclusive newsletter for Premium subscribers that brings you weekly business insights based on timely data analysis by our editorial team and exclusive polling. 

This week, we polled 2,717 people to learn what they think about Walmart+, Walmart's planned subscription service.

One big takeaway:

• Amazon Prime could lose droves of members to Walmart+. Amazon Prime members (31%) are more likely than all U.S. adults (27%) to say they'll sign up for Walmart+. And 40% of Prime members who earn under $50,000 say they'd likely sign-up for Walmart+. The jury is still out if they'd subscribe to both services at once—so 1 in 3 of Amazon Prime members could switch over to Walmart+. That'd be a massive blow to Prime's membership base of 150 million.

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More essential reads

• Amazon instructs employees to delete TikTok from phones, then retracts the order by Jeff John Roberts
• TikTok traders are pumping joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin—and the price is up 95% by Robert Hackett
• Why did India ban TikTok? by Jeremy Kahn
• How the West’s work from home trend is fueling China’s GDP growth by Eamon Barrett
  

From the archives

“So far, ByteDance, whose investors include SoftBank and KKR, has proved remarkably adept at keeping that gumball machine from getting smashed up in the escalating U.S.-China trade war. Even as the Trump administration added dozens of Chinese tech companies to a national security blacklist, TikTok quietly continued to invade (or rather, get invited into) the bedrooms of millions of American teenagers.”

—China’s TikTok tries to avoid the backlash by Clay Chandler, October 2019

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