Washington wants TikTok. It's not about China

What started as a bipartisan move to check Chinese influence has ended in a deeper crisis for US democracy.

- Cory Alpert

A sculpture with the logo for Douyin in Beijing. Like TikTok, the popular online platform is owned by Chinese company ByteDance. When the US Congress debated banning TikTok, the case was framed as national security: Simply having the app on phones was said to endanger the country. But it turns out, the real danger was never so much about data-mining as it was about mind-moulding, says the writer. PHOTO: EPA

(EPA)

In 2024, the US Congress passed a Bill demanding that TikTok be sold to an American owner. At the time, the issue enjoyed rare bipartisan consensus.

The most common refrain was that TikTok was a national security risk — that its algorithm was so powerful that it was having undue influence on the American population, and at the behest of the Chinese government.

TikTok found itself in the middle of a swirling storm of questions about social media and national security and understandably so. It had come to define a culture-making form of media, shaping how people engage with each other, and quickly overtaking Instagram, Facebook and X.

TikTok’s stickiness as a platform for short-form videos forced others to create similar formats. Even so, it’s clear who dominates. YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels today are almost entirely filled with repurposed TikToks.

At the heart of this is TikTok’s algorithm, which seemed to possess a unique power. Anyone who has spent an hour on TikTok knows it feels qualitatively different from other social media platforms: more addictive, more precise in knowing what will hold your gaze, and relentless in maximising your time on screen.

In doing so, it shapes not just consumption but the very content that gets created — building an entire world in its image.