Opinion | TikTok May Be More Dangerous Than It Looks – By Ezra Klein (New York Times) – May 8, 2022
At the core of the frenzied interest in Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter is an intuition that I think is right: The major social media platforms are, in some hard-to-define way, essential to modern life. Call them town squares. Call them infrastructure. They exist in some nether region between public utility and private concern. They are too important to entrust to billionaires and businesses, but that makes them too dangerous to hand over to governments. We have not yet found a satisfying answer to the problem of their ownership and governance. But some arrangements are more worrying than others. There are fates worse than Musk.
TikTok, as we know it today, is only a few years old. But its growth is like nothing we’ve seen before. In 2021, it had more active users than Twitter, more U.S. watch minutes than YouTube, more app downloads than Facebook, more site visits than Google. The app is best known for viral dance trends, but there was a time when Twitter was 140-character updates about lunch orders and Facebook was restricted to elite universities. Things change. Perhaps they have already changed. A few weeks ago, I gave a lecture at a Presbyterian college in South Carolina, and asked some of the students where they liked to get their news. Almost every one said TikTok.
TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. And Chinese companies are vulnerable to the whims and the will of the Chinese government. There is no possible ambiguity on this point: The Chinese Communist Party spent much of the last year cracking down on its tech sector. They made a particular example out of Jack Ma, the high-flying founder of Alibaba. The message was unmistakable: Chief executives will act in accordance with party wishes or see their lives upended and their companies dismembered.
CONTINUE > https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/08/opinion/tiktok-twitter-china-bytedance.html
