TikTok is its own worst enemy

TikTok creator Emmy Combs, center, a makeup artist who has alopecia, watches a feed of the House vote as TikTok supporters gather outside the Capitol in Washington, March 13, 2024. 'The video-sharing app has gotten unfair treatment in Washington,' writes New York Times columnist Kevin Roose. 'But the company's biggest wounds are self-inflicted.' [Kent Nishimura/The New York Times]

SAN FRANCISCO - I was really rooting for TikTok.

In 2020, when the Trump administration first tried to force TikTok's Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or risk having it shut down, I argued that banning TikTok in the United States would do more harm than good.

Why? Partly because TikTok seemed like a convenient scapegoat for problems - invasive data collection, opaque content policies, addictive recommendation algorithms - that plagued all the big social media apps, and partly because I never bought the argument that the app was a Chinese spying tool hiding in plain sight.

I'm still skeptical of that argument. If the Chinese government wanted to snoop on Americans through their smartphones, it wouldn't have to use TikTok to do it. It could buy troves of information from a data broker, thanks to America's nonexistent federal data-privacy laws.

And...

Continue reading on: