TikTok Parent Company Moves into Sciences, Pharma
By Movieguide® Contributor
TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, is moving into the fields of chemistry, biology, natural sciences and pharmaceuticals, and its motives for doing so are unclear.
Forbes reported, “The Beijing-based tech giant is recruiting American talent in computational biology, quantum chemistry, molecular dynamics and physics for its ‘AI for Drug Design’ and ‘AI for Science’ teams, according to LinkedIn posts reviewed by Forbes. ByteDance appears to be hiring for at least 17 of these positions across New York, California and Washington state—taking a swing at local rivals like Meta, Google and Amazon, where similar work is already underway.”
There is uncertainty as to why Bytedance is pursuing projects in the sciences or what, if anything, these undertakings have to do with social media.
However, developments are already underway, as the company purchased a hospital chain.
“Earlier this month, ByteDance acquired Amcare Healthcare, one of China’s biggest private hospital chains, for a reported $1.5 billion,” Forbes added. “That might sound strange, given that the Beijing-based company has become a household name as the parent of TikTok, the fastest-growing social media platform in the world. But ByteDance’s foray into hospitals is just the latest example of how the tech giant’s ambitions extend far beyond the wildly popular video app.”
Some have speculated that Bytedance might use TikTok to understand users’ conditions and then market drugs specifically to them.
“Pharmaceutical companies typically work around what’s called a ‘target product profile,’ a rubric that helps them distill what their optimal drug would look like the conditions or key problems they’d address with it and who their ideal patients candidates or markets are,” Forbes noted.
TikTok, “where many people are drawn to health and wellness content, talk openly about medical issues and regularly seek information on what has (or hasn’t) worked for others,” could give ByteDance the ability to create these profiles and market drugs at specific users based on the data.
This “could serve as an invaluable feedback loop and marketing tool for drug developers,” Forbes said. “Spending data collected from TikTok Shop and in-app purchases could also be useful.”
Douglas Schmidt, associate provost for research and co-director of the Data Science Institute at Vanderbilt University, added, “If you could find a way to sell products that would be appealing to [TikTok users], you can certainly imagine [building] up a robust pharmaceuticals industry or a competitive product, then advertising it on TikTok.”
Former FDA chief scientist Eric Perkins shared his concerns about the situation.
“They could be doing large-scale hypothesis generation with all this data, and then they could be feeding that data into Chinese pharmaceutical companies or Chinese weapons manufacturers or Chinese whatever,” he explained. “The same technologies that allow us to develop new medicines can be used for bioweapons. It’s a very similar set of capabilities.”
Movieguide® previously reported on TikTok:
A new study found that users who use the Chinese-language version of TikTok, Douyin, are likely to favor Chinese political views with anti-American sentiments.
“In a public opinion poll released on December 11, 18.2 percent of respondents identified themselves as Chinese-speaking TikTok users, who were active on the app an average of 4.4 days per week,” Newsweek reported.
“Respondents in that group were more likely, by up to 10 percentage points or more, to agree with arguments that cast skepticism on the United States while leaning toward China’s political positions, according to the results published by Taiwan‘s Information Environment Research Center (IORG), a nonprofit specializing in fact-checking and disinformation on Chinese-language social media,” Newsweek explained.
The Chinese-speaking users agreed that Taiwan-U.S. relations are “provoking China” and that a successful financial future for Taiwan means more trade deals with Beijing are needed.
