TikTok is a Chinese video-sharing social media network that has taken off in popularity globally.
Created by Alex Zhu, the service faces a lot of scrutiny.
Not only because it's owned by Chinese company ByteDance, but also because it experienced several security issues.
And this time, it is again under the spotlight after several accounts belonging to Korean celebrities have been 'mysteriously' disappearing.
When asked by JTBC News, the flagship nightly newscast of South Korean television network JTBC, ByteDance said that they cannot explain why the accounts were deleted.
"That might be caused by the celebrities entertainment companies. We cannot tell you further information as to what must have happened or why it happened," said a spokesperson from TikTok.
There are thirteen Korean celebrity accounts that have disappeared.
They include celebrities such as Rain, MAMAMOO, TWICE, and Hyoyeon.
Gary from Leessan who have started using TikTok to further interact with fans internationally, including fans in China. also has his account disappeared. With followers close to 1.5 million, his account disappeared all of a sudden. The videos and photos he uploaded are nowhere to be found.
HyunA's account which had almost 2.8 million followers, also disappeared, and so did Super Junior Kim Heechul's account.
This incident was first spotted by a Chinese netizen who posted on an online community saying that he cannot search for the accounts of Korean celebrities on July 12th.
Some Chinese netizens started speculating whether China has started banning Korean products and Korean culture.
It was then revealed that some of the South Korean celebrities actually had their accounts blocked from view, only on TikTok's China version Douyin.
The reasons for the blocks were unknown, but the move happened a few days after South Korea’s media regulator slapped fines on the short-video app for data privacy non-compliance.
The Korea Communications Commission (KCC), which is the country's communications regulator, fined TikTok Pte Ltd, the publisher of the app, ₩186 million ($154,320) for collecting personal information of children under 14 years of age without consent from guardians or parents.
The fine is equivalent to 3% of the company's annual sales in South Korea, an amount designated for this kind of violation under Korea's local privacy laws.
This was the result of an investigation that began in October 2019.
The KCC found that TikTok illegally gathered some 6,000 pieces of data involving children and failed to inform local users before moving their personal data onto its servers rented from Alibaba Cloud in the U.S. and Singapore.
TikTok was required to submit voluntary preventative measures within 30 days. KCC plans to continue discussions with TikTok on information security issues, said a KCC official.
Accounts of the stars were blocked from view only on Douyin.
Douyin and TikTok operated independently and the accounts that were blocked on Douyin were working normally on TikTok, a TikTok spokeswoman said.
TikTok had been downloaded over 2 billion times globally. And as of the end of 2019, the app had 3.4 million users in South Korea. Since arriving into the country in 2017, TikTok has been popular among teenagers.