On the war board digital influence Two very different axes compete for copper, which respond to what also happens in the physical world: China and the United States. The country of the dollar has much more digital weapons: Google, Meta, Instagram, X…China mainly has TikTok.
Although the Beijing dictatorship has only one bullet against the immense digital powder keg of the country of the dollar, it has a great advantage: the psychological reach of TikTok, especially among the youngest. The algorithm ByteDance -the company that owns it- understands the user better than Instagram, something fundamental in the cultural battle. TikTok videos have a much greater viralization capacityin addition to engaging the user for much longer.
Donald Trump does not trust the platform. He spent months making threats against it, until his wishes materialized in a law that requires TikTok to sell or separate its business assets to stop being controlled by China and pass into North American hands in this country.
Generation Z has become wary of heavily edited or AI-generated content on TikTok. Now they opt for anonymous and cruder opinions like those on Reddit on topics such as finances, rents or health
ByteDance will thus have less than 20% of the shares according to what is established by law, while the North American Oraclea leading technology company in the country of the stars and stripes, will become TikTok’s security provider. Your job will be to supervise and guarantee all its operations in the United States. With this imposition, Trump will have control, to a certain extent, of the application.
A strategy that has been reinforced by Google’s movements. The search engine made changes to your algorithm -in charge of giving the user the results of the searches carried out- in 2024 and 2025, something that affected TikTok traffic.
In fact, information extracted from reports from Ofcom, the United Kingdom’s communications regulator, ensures that Reddit – the most famous American digital forum – has surpassed TikTok as the fourth most visited social media service in the country. The determining factor has been, as we have mentioned, the radical change in Google’s way of operating.
It is not something that is limited only to the UK. In the United States, Reddit is already the third most visited site, competing neck and neck with Meta’s Facebook. In Europe, especially in Germany, France and Spain, the same pattern is being seen.
Artificial Intelligence is not liked
Another reason for the flight of TikTok users to competing platforms comes from the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). It is an advance that generates mistrust and it is precisely the new generations, the youngest, who are replacing the Chinese social network with others that are more real and easier to interact with real users, such as Reddit.
In addition, this platform is used as a filter in countries such as Canada or Australia. There, users have adopted the custom of adding the word “Reddit” to the end of their Google searches to avoid the spam generated by Artificial Intelligenceas well as the viral videos with little substance.
The links between Google and Reddit are also commercial – and this is key. Both signed a million-dollar agreement for Google’s AI (Gemini) to be trained with Reddit data. As a result, the latter became the most cited source in the search engine’s AI summaries.
The reality is that, in an increasingly synthetic or AI-generated Internet, Reddit has become a haven of authenticity, whether naturally or prompted by Google. While TikTok pushes content based on what it thinks the user will like, Google bets on Reddit for the solution of specific and real problems. If we add to this that TikTok is going to become American in terms of shareholders, the neutralization of the Chinese social network in the United States is a fact. Trump has gotten his way.
