China's ByteDance pushes Lemon8 app in US as TikTok faces possible ban: Report

ByteDance is pushing a new social media app in the United States as the Chinese tech giant's flagship app TikTok faces a possible ban. According to a report by CNBC late Monday (April 24), ByteDance had invited creators onto the Lemon8 platform before it officially rolls out in the US. Lemon8, a lifestyle app, is a blend of Instagram and Pinterest. The app was first launched in Japan in 2020. Citing data.ai, a data analytics firm, the CNBC report on Monday said that Lemon8 jumped 693 positions to become the second-most downloaded lifestyle app in the US in the last 30 days. Since its launch, Lemon8 accumulated 17 million downloads worldwide.

Glenn Gerstell, a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said that some of the algorithms used in Lemon8 are similar to or the same as the recommendation algorithms in TikTok, which would make these apps "tremendously popular" as they feed people what they want to see and move on.

Lindsay Gorman, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, meanwhile, said, "You could see this as the competitive move of a company that’s trying to expand into different consumer markets and segments with more image-based and longer-form written content as opposed to only short-form videos."

Lemon8's growing popularity comes as TikTok faces a possible ban in the US amid concerns about potential Chinese government influence over the platform. CNBC reported that the lifestyle app's links to ByteDance and TikTok will come under the radar of American regulators.

While pointing out Lemon8's success in Japan, Glenn Gerstell said that if the app gets shut out of the US market, "they have still got (millions of) people around the world who could be users of this app."

Both Gerstell and Lindsay Gorman said that Lemon8 could also serve as an alternative for content creators if TikTok was banned in the US.

However, creating another app to replace TikTok was not a quick solution for ByteDance, according to analysts. Glenn Gerstell said, “It might give them a fallback in case something gets hurt on TikTok but I don’t see it as generating a solution for ByteDance in this regard.”

And Lindsay Gorman said as Lemon8 gained more popularity, it spoke to the need for American regulators to come up with a comprehensive framework to understand "the risks of Chinese internet apps and address them before they spiral out of control."

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