How the World Got Wired · The Other Internet

The Politics

There is something complicated about TikTok that I have to tell you about now, because the kid you are will probably read about it in the news a lot as you grow up.

TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is a Chinese company. Under Chinese law, every Chinese company must, if the government asks, share information with the government. The Chinese government has the authority — as a matter of national law — to instruct ByteDance to do almost anything with TikTok’s data or with what TikTok shows people.

ByteDance and TikTok have repeatedly said that this has never happened — that they have never been ordered by the Chinese government to share American user data, or to favor or hide particular kinds of videos. Many people in the American government do not entirely believe them. Many people in the American government also point out that even if it has not happened yet, the legal power for it to happen exists, and that an app with hundreds of millions of American users, whose feed could in theory be tuned by a foreign government to influence what those Americans see and believe, is a national security concern.

This argument has been going on for years. In 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order trying to ban TikTok in the United States. Courts blocked the order. In 2024, the United States Congress passed a law saying that ByteDance had to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or be banned in America. President Joe Biden signed the law. The deadline was set for early 2025.

Then, in a strange twist, President Trump won the 2024 election. He had, during that election, made enormous use of TikTok to reach younger voters. After his election, he decided he did not want to ban TikTok after all. The deadline kept getting extended. As this book is being written, the future of TikTok in America is still being argued over.

There is something deeply weird about all of this, and I want you to see it clearly.

A Chinese app, technically owned by a company that operates under the legal authority of an authoritarian government, has become one of the main ways American teenagers and adults receive news and entertainment. Both major American political parties have used it heavily in their campaigns. Both have argued, at different times, that it should be banned. Both have, at different times, refused to ban it. The same politicians have, in some cases, taken both positions within the same year.

This is not a story with a clean conclusion. It is an ongoing situation. Different people in your generation will end up in different places on what should be done. You may have a strong opinion. You may have a different opinion every year. What I can tell you is that this exact tension — between an internet that crosses borders freely and a world made up of countries that want to control what crosses their borders — is going to keep coming up, in different forms, for the rest of your life. TikTok is the version of it your generation grew up with. There will be other versions.

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