COPYCAT CONCERNS

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Wednesday to investigate Zynn, a clone of short-form video app TikTok that pays users to watch videos and has rocketed up app store charts.

Zynn’s layout is nearly identical to that of TikTok, an app from rival Beijing-based company ByteDance that has well over 100 million downloads in the United States. Zynn is created by Kuaishou, another Chinese company.

Kuaishou runs the second biggest video app in China, only trailing Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Unlike TikTok, however, Zynn claims to pay users both to watch videos and get their friends to sign up.

Hawley said in his letter to the FTC that Zynn’s payment system “smacks of a textbook predatory-pricing scheme.”

“The most substantial payments come from referrals: just like a traditional pyramid scheme, users receive exponentially larger payouts once they successfully convince others to install Zynn on their own devices,” he wrote. “The more devices on which Zynn is installed, the more money early adopters can make.”

The Republican senator also raised concerns about the company’s ties to China.

He said that the app may be used to “empower Chinese leadership to pry into the private affairs of Americans by hoovering up enormous amounts of information,” alluding to a 2017 law that requires Chinese companies to comply with data requests for state intelligence work.