08/17/18

A public spat between two warring and wildly popular Chinese apps has had the feel of a teenage dance-off. Sorry, Douyin Fans, ran an article from the short video app on its WeChat account,

in which it accused the mobile-messaging service of disabling links to Douyin's most popular videos. All hail Douyin the drama queen, retorted Tencent, WeChat's parent, which said it had acted because the content was inappropriate.

On June 1st Tencent sued Douyin's parent company, Bytedance, for 1 yuan (15 cents) and demanded it apologise for its accusations-on its own platforms (and presumably without the snark).

Tencent also alleged unfair competition. Within hours Douyin counter-sued for 90m yuan. Bytedance and Tencent later swapped accusations of tolerating smear campaigns against the other on their apps,

and filed police reports about defamatory posts. Rarely has an upstart so piqued Tencent, a Chinese gaming and social-media titan

which in November became Asia's first company worth over half-a-trillion dollars. At first blush WeChat and Douyin (which translates as trill) appear to inhabit distinct worlds.

The former is a super-app in which more than 1bn users not only chat but also order food, give to charity and pay utility bills. Douyin is a bottomless, eclectic feed of looped 15-second videos, a cross between Snap chat,

Vine (now defunct) and Musical. ly, which Bytedance bought in November. The clips, shot by users, range from a dexterous noodle-maker in Chongqing to a shimmying peacock in a bamboo grove, all set to music.

Different though the services are, Bytedance's use of artificial intelligence to create tailored offerings for each viewer on Douyin-and on Toutiao, a newsfeed-is winning attention. According to QuestMobile, a data vendor,

in early 2017 users began to spend more time on Toutiao, Douyin and two other Bytedance video apps, Xigua and Huoshan, than they did on Tencent's news and video offerings.