By Elaine Moore, Financial Times
American teenagers distraught at the idea of losing access to TikTok have spent the past couple of weeks using the video-sharing app to plead their case. This being TikTok, home of chaotic parodies and memes, they are all a send-up. One girl sways seductively while pretending to add bricks to a Mexican border wall in order to get on President Donald Trump’s good side. Another flashes a picture of her empty bank account to show she has no data worth protecting. It is no use.
The US still fears the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance poses a threat to national security. TikTok’s efforts to prove otherwise by installing an American former Disney executive as its boss and telling the New York Times that ByteDance is not a Beijing-based company because it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands have failed. Last Friday, Mr Trump ordered ByteDance to sell TikTok’s US operations within 90 days or face a shutdown.
The battle for TikTok is really about data harvesting. The app’s algorithm is worth fighting over. It took TikTok less than an hour to understand that I didn’t want to watch tweens falling off skateboards and would much rather spend time in the cosy world of sloth-Tok (videos of sloths) and “cottagecore”, where people in twee dresses bake bread.
