Light on Safety: How TikTok Lite Sacrifices User Protections in the Global South

An investigation into TikTok Lite — a low-bandwidth alternative to the TikTok app predominantly accessible in the so-called Global Majority countries in South America, Africa, and Asia — has revealed significant safety concerns.

Tech firms eagerly target emerging markets in continents like South America, Asia and Africa, where regulatory hurdles are often less stringent compared to the EU or the U.S.

This is where tech platforms turn to “Lite” apps: are stripped-down versions of a service’s applications which are much smaller in size, use less airtime, use less power, have special features and offer lower quality content formats.

Chinese firm TikTok is no exception. In comparing TikTok Lite with the classic TikTok app, a joint study by AI Forensics and the Mozilla Foundation found several discrepancies between trust and safety features that could have potentially dangerous consequences in the context of elections and public health.

TikTok Lite users are deprived of essential safety measures such as content filtering, screen management tools, and warning labels for dangerous, graphic, or misleading content. These missing features leave users vulnerable to harmful material and addictive behaviors. While the flagship TikTok app includes robust safety protocols, these are conspicuously absent in the Lite version, despite being technically feasible to implement.

The findings are concerning, and reinforce patterns of double-standard, the study concludes.

As the study says:

The absence of a substantial number of safety features in TikTok Lite, an app with 1 billion users largely in Global Majority countries, is a cause for alarm. This trend mirrors a well-established pattern among companies in the context of global capitalism and exploitation, where substandard and unsafe products often find a dumping ground in economically disadvantaged regions. Consequently, TikTok Lite -Save Data users may be more susceptible to app addiction and exposed to potentially more graphic, dangerous, misleading, and otherwise harmful content.

In light of these findings, we recommend that Bytedance prioritize the development of a TikTok Lite application that places equal emphasis on user safety compared to its main TikTok app.