A colleague recently sent me a TikTok she thought I’d find interesting. I clicked the link but immediately regretted it. I quickly cleared my browser history but felt it was too late and that the Chinese government was probably in my phone for good now.
As a former U.S. diplomat, I might be unusually sensitive to that possibility, having served in places where we took for granted that foreign state actors were listening in. But the combination of geopolitical rivalry, China’s surveillance state and the viral power of social media does feel potent.
If you’re reading this column, you may not be one of the 100 million American users of TikTok, the wildly popular video-sharing social media app that some lawmakers want to ban nationally. About 60% of American TikTok users are under the age of 24, and 76% are younger than 44.
