| Hi all, it's Eric. I'm writing this as I scroll through TikTok hoping that the words come to me. Apparently I'm not the only one lost in the stream of silly videos—the Chinese app is rapidly becoming the biggest story in American social media. ByteDance Ltd., the company that owns the app, announced this week it had recruited Disney executive Kevin Mayer, long regarded as a potential successor to former CEO Bob Iger, as its chief operating officer. His main job will be running TikTok. Then, my colleagues at Bloomberg reported that ByteDance had sold shares that valued the company at over $100 billion on the private market, signaling that at least some investors thought the company is worth more than four times the value of Snap Inc. and about half of the Walt Disney Co. Many highflying startups are falling into a pit of despair, as illustrated in SoftBank's latest earnings presentation. If this week's news is any guide, ByteDance is a company headed in a different direction. But the next year could be rocky. Pressure is already building on TikTok. The U.S. government kicked off a national security review of the app last year. The Federal Trade Commission fined ByteDance $5.7 million last year for violating children's privacy. Earlier this year, the New York Times ran an op-ed warning about the risk of the app's data collection. It asked, "If your face appears in the background of another person's TikTok video shot in Berlin, will it be logged using facial recognition software running in Shanghai?"
There's a lot we don't know about what information the company is sharing with the Chinese government. And scrutiny on companies with ties to China is likely to pick up this year, especially from the American right. Republicans are reportedly planning to push some of America's attention onto China in order to deflect blame for the coronavirus away from President Donald Trump. The president himself has been arguing that China is responsible for tens of thousands of American Covid-19 deaths. This is some heavy geopolitics for an app whose main appeal is access to a stream of happy-looking people lip-syncing and acting out silly sketches. Of course, TikTok is also powered by sophisticated artificial intelligence technology, which is tuned for maximal engagement rather than to encourage its users' best impulses. Predators interested in using the app to harass younger posters, for instance, could be shown more and more of the accounts they gravitate towards. TikTok also has to figure out content moderation. When nude pictures of a then 17-year-old teenager leaked online, commenters on the app uploaded the images their profile pictures to flood her comments section. Some of those cropped images still appear on the user's posts today. All social media sites have been grappling with issues like these in recent years, and we're a long way from reaching some sort of societal consensus around whether these types of self-reinforcing algorithms are healthy. But if American lawmakers seem hostile to Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.'s YouTube, they have even greater political incentives to give TikTok a hard time. This month, Republican Senator Josh Hawley introduced legislation to ban TikTok from government devices for security reasons. After Mayer's hiring was announced, Hawley tweeted that the company "previously told me they couldn't attend hearings and testify because executives were located in #China. But this new executive lives in the USA. I look forward to hearing from him. Under oath." For now, ByteDance is arguing that it's not a Chinese company because its incorporated in the Cayman Islands. In becoming its American face, Mayer is the one who is going to have to sell TikTok to increasingly hostile public officials. One thing's for sure, he isn't in the Magical Kingdom anymore. —Eric Newcomer | 
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