Who owns the narrative? If United States lawmakers are to be believed, it is currently at risk of being hijacked by China, disseminated on de facto spyware by impressionable youth swiping short-form videos in their bedrooms.
Official tutting at TikTok, owned by China’s ByteDance, is nothing new. The prospect of a ban has been looming for a while. In March, US senators introduced the Restrict Act, a bipartisan bid to give the president powers to boot it out of US cyberspace on national security grounds.
