TikTok is not just the most downloaded app in the world; it’s the most powerful information platform on the planet.
The app is also a political flashpoint. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company under the shadow of Beijing. For years, US lawmakers have tried to rein it in, either by banning it outright or forcing a sale to American investors. Now, with Donald Trump back in office, that fight has entered a new phase that could reshape the social media landscape. Last week, Trump signed an executive order approving the creation of a new entity — TikTok US — that would allow the app to remain available in America despite the “ban” that Congress passed in 2024. Trump’s allies — Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle), Michael Dell (of Dell Technologies), and the Murdochs — will reportedly be involved in running the new company. China still has to approve the deal.
Emily Baker-White is a senior writer at Forbes and the author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok. Her reporting exposed how ByteDance employees accessed American users’ data and how TikTok’s internal systems gave the company enormous influence over what we see.
I invited Baker-White onto The Gray Area to talk about the latest news in the potential US-China TikTok deal, how Washington and Beijing are playing this game, and why the app has become a cultural superpower. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
TikTok isn’t just another social platform. Why is it so addictive?
TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, believed information could find people better than people could find information. On older platforms, you followed accounts and searched for things. On TikTok, you open the app and it just goes. It watches how long you linger, how you interact, and the experience is so frictionless that it figures you out while you do nothing.
And it’s designed to take away agency — it feeds you what you’ll want without you asking.
Exactly. And it’s sneaky because we like it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t use it. We’re giving up agency without noticing, because the product is pleasant.
Is part of the pleasure not having to think?
Decision fatigue is real. You didn’t used to have to do anything in the checkout line. You could just stand there and be a person waiting your turn. Now you can’t just, you know, raw dog the checkout line. When did that become intolerable? When did we have to be doing something in every tiny pause of daily life?
TikTok’s For You feed is a prediction machine based on revealed preferences, not what we say we like. How does that change user psychology? Which content thrives, compared with Facebook/Instagram/X?
TikTok helped lead a broader shift: We now see far less from people we actually know and far more from professional creators. That’s true on TikTok and, increasingly, on Instagram and Facebook. It’s as much like Netflix as OG Facebook — people don’t go there to see friends.
I held out for a long time but finally experimented with TikTok for this interview. It’s pure, uncut social media heroin. From the second you log on, you can see it learning your mind, predicting what you want, and feeding you the perfect digital drug designed just for you.
Most people who’ve tried it agree — and Instagram Reels knows it.
Let’s talk moderation. We’ve discussed the algorithm; what’s the human role at TikTok?
Today it’s similar to other big UGC [user-generated content] platforms. Algorithms flag likely violations; large teams of human moderators enforce rules and tune those systems. Policies in the US now look broadly like competitors’. Early on, it was different — more “Chinese” policy defaults that were later “Westernized.” One distinctive piece is the internal heating tool.
The heating button — what is it?
It lets certain staff give a video a fixed number of impressions — 5,000, 50,000, 5 million — overriding the recommender. That initial shove often triggers further organic growth. Early on, many people had access. Humans used it to teach the system what “good” looked like when the algo was still rough. Marketing later used it to woo creators and partners. TikTok eventually restricted access and wrote stricter policies, but misuse did happen — and with a tool like that, some misuse likely persists.
Other platforms boost and demote content too. What makes this different?
Everyone tunes distribution. What stood out here was how explicit, granular, and widely available the “big red button” was — at least historically. (If folks at other platforms have similar tools, my Signal is open.)
How do you see TikTok’s cultural and political force compared with Facebook and Twitter?
Facebook and Instagram are more comparable in size, and YouTube is enormous. But TikTok is really, really big — on the order of a 2019 or 2020 Facebook, if not bigger. And remember, you’re making fewer choices about what to see. That means you’re ceding more control over your information diet to a faceless machine — and the people who build and govern it.
How much control does Beijing have over TikTok? Or is “leverage” the better word?
Leverage. In China, authorities can coerce employees — “do this or else” — including by threatening family. If a China-based ByteDance/TikTok employee can access US data or influence ranking, the state could compel them. That capability is the concern. There’s limited public evidence they’ve exercised it extensively — capability does not equal action — but the leverage is real as long as China-based staff exist with relevant access.
Is there evidence China has used TikTok as an ideological weapon?
In the US, I’ve seen no public evidence of PRC manipulation of discourse via TikTok. Years ago, TikTok had restrictive policies around China topics; those changed. There’s classified material — referenced obliquely in TikTok’s court filings — that US officials say involves manipulation abroad, but I haven’t seen it.
ByteDance’s answer to America’s ban on TikTok was Project Texas — walling off US data under Oracle. How did that go?
Conceptually, “driver carries no cash”: [The US] cut China-side access [to Oracle] so coercion can’t yield US data. They spent billions trying to bifurcate. But there are hundreds of internal tools and data pipes; closing every last pathway is Sisyphean. They got far, but the “last mile” is hard to guarantee. The US eventually doubted a solution, short of full separation, would be foolproof.
What made that technical challenge so daunting in practice?
If you’ve ever worked inside a big tech company, you know how many internal tools there are and how much they talk to each other. TikTok is propped up by hundreds of them. The consumer app you see sits on top of 500 internal apps. Cutting off data flows across all of them was a maze-like, Sisyphean task. They closed most pathways, but the last mile was nearly impossible.
Walk me through the policy saga.
Trump first tried to ban [TikTok], then to force a sale; he used the wrong legal mechanism and lost in court. Biden’s team negotiated Project Texas for about 2 years, then pivoted to “sell or be banned,” pushing Congress to pass a law. ByteDance challenged; the case went to SCOTUS, which upheld the law. On the eve of [Trump’s second] inauguration, TikTok briefly “flickered” off; after taking office, Trump ordered DOJ not to enforce the law. TikTok has lived in that purgatory since.
And TikTok publicly thanked Trump for “saving” it.
Quite a turn from their early “Donald Trump isn’t on TikTok — download now” ads.
After all your reporting, how do you feel about TikTok now?
Personally, I hate autoplay video — on any platform. I downloaded TikTok to report on it; cute animals aside, I’m not a natural video consumer. That probably saved me from addiction.
You end the book noting Zhang Yiming is already moving on to AGI (artificial general intelligence). That seems…interesting.
He’s a builder. TikTok’s hard problems are largely solved; generative AI is the next frontier. The TikTok story isn’t about AI, but the core questions — agency, control, who steers your reality — are the same.
When you think about an algorithm, replace the word with a guy named Bob. If Bob shouldn’t be fixing prices across industries, an algorithm shouldn’t either. If Bob shouldn’t have access to everyone’s Social Security numbers, neither should an algorithm. Algorithms are made by people, for people’s interests — and when we forget that, we give them far too much power.
We don’t usually do addendums, but the legal future of TikTok might have changed after we spoke. What do we know now?
More than before, but details are thin. Both the US and Chinese sides say they’ve made progress. Trump is calling it a deal and extended non-enforcement of the ban law. Reporting suggests he’ll sign an order declaring the deal meets last year’s statute — he has wide latitude there. The prospective US buyers/overseers include Oracle (already TikTok’s cloud/TTP), Andreessen Horowitz, and possibly the Murdochs. Terms — and who gets what power — remain unclear.
Are there contours of the deal we do know?
Both sides say ByteDance keeps ownership of the recommender algorithm; US TikTok would license it. “License” can range from “do whatever you want” to heavily restricted. How open it is will determine real separation. You’ll also see the word “lease”; the label matters less than the control terms.
Oracle says it will “retrain the algorithm from the ground up.” What could that mean?
Models are only as good as their training data. TikTok’s was built over years on vast, mixed corpora (including scraped public web). Will ByteDance hand over those corpora? Do they still have them? If the new owners can’t replicate inputs, users may notice “new TikTok” isn’t as good — which is a business risk.
Will Oracle keep American users’ data walled off from China?
Likely similar to today’s TikTok US Data Security setup: new US user data housed in Oracle-controlled TTP, [trusted technology partner] walled from ByteDance. The draft deal would formalize and continue that.
What do the new US stakeholders get besides a shit ton of money?
Money is plenty. But there’s also influence over speech rules: bullying/hate policies, moderation posture, priority signals. Many on the left see this as handing a massive speech platform to Trump allies. Savvy owners won’t overtly politicize fast — that’s bad business (just look at what happened to Twitter/X). But ownership ultimately steers policy.
Well, it does appear to be Trump handing it over to his powerful political allies. People like Larry Ellison of Oracle, Marc Andreessen, the Murdochs of Fox News — they’re all involved in this potential deal and it has a whiff of corruption. Am I missing something here?
I don’t think that’s wrong. If the Soros group wanted in, or Warren Buffett, I’m not at all sure Trump would be interested in making that happen. You’re looking at a president who has involved himself in the private sector, and in private deals, far more than any president in recent history.
He’s delivering an organ of speech to his allies — to people he believes will use it in ways he approves of. It’s a very weird deal. When I think about the law Congress passed, in a way they were trying to curtail presidential authority, but the way it was written still gave an immense amount of power to the president. And I think a lot of the people who passed it didn’t imagine a president so willing to engage in naked self-dealing.
If they had, they might have written it differently. That’s just true — I don’t think many would have done it this way if they’d foreseen the moment we’re in now.
How much better is this arrangement than Beijing controlling TikTok?
The book’s “authoritarian shakedown” concern was always the foil to a state that can’t do that. We’re now watching a US executive attempt to shape distribution and punish critics. We’re about to find out which is “better,” but the CCP-like tactics are worrying.
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The post Why TikTok is so influential — and why that’s particularly worrisome now appeared first on Vox.
