Two years of breathless coverage of TikTok as a fresh-faced force of delight and opportunity have made the app feel like an underdog bet in a prizefight against entrenched ne’er-do-wells, such as Trump and Facebook.īut TikTok, I regret to inform you, is also bad. and China, or as fuel for a generation gap between Boomers and Zoomers, or as a David facing off with the tech-establishment Goliath. It’s gratifying to cast TikTok as an innocent bystander in a trade war between the U.S. Read: TikTok stars are preparing to take over the internet “I need my cat videos.” Some teens who love the platform have even become newly endeared to Microsoft, the most boring of old-guard tech companies, as TikTok’s possible savior. “They can pry TikTok from my cold dead hands,” one fan said. Among the many horrors of 2020, America can add a multibillion-dollar international dispute about a data-vacuuming platform on which people … film themselves in their bathroom mirrors and prank their parents. The threat that the White House might disappear a favorite app has turned esoteric trade diplomacy into a tiny culture war. ( Often they didn’t.) Microsoft has emerged as the likeliest suitor-and among the only ones capable of shelling out an estimated $20 billion to $50 billion for a cat-dancing video app. It’s ironic to try to blockade a foreign app, given that America has imposed Facebook, Google, Uber, and all the others on the rest of the world, whether those nations asked for them or not. Unless, as Trump has put it, a “ very American” company buys TikTok from ByteDance, the platform’s Chinese owner, and repatriates its data. Today, Donald Trump issued an executive order that would ban TikTok’s clever videos from American shores entirely. This fact rankles the White House because the company could pass U.S. But it’s not exactly like any other social-media platform, because TikTok is one of the only Chinese-made apps that is broadly popular in America. It’s also a data-collecting social-media platform that sells and serves ads, like any other social-media platform. What is TikTok though? It’s an app for creating and sharing short videos, but that description undersells its delight: lip-synched anthems that spawn split-screen duet replies “challenges” that turn boring tasks into virtuosic dances wry, incisive takedowns of national politics by teens too young to vote pets, kids, emo kids, emo pets, and comedians.
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