How ByteDance and TikTok, which owe their existence to intermingled Western and Chinese ideas, capital, and people, became entangled in the US-China rift
A Chinese app conquered the planet — and now the U.S. is threatening to shut it down. Can the world's biggest virality machine survive?
New York TimesAlex W. Palmer
Context & Ripple Effects
ByteDance built TikTok into a global virality machine by doing what almost no Chinese consumer-internet company had managed: crossing borders with light, youth-oriented fare while staying headquartered in Beijing, as its ~$75B cross-border expansion showed as early as 2018. Founder Zhang Yiming's bet was that an international platform could sit above the US-China divide — a bet tested in 2020 when Washington first moved to ban the app and ByteDance responded with appeasements aimed at both capitals, detailed in its attempt to straddle the US-China internet divide.
This retrospective lands at the moment that strategy has visibly failed: the app that gave Western users their first taste of what politics can do to a flourishing social space — something users elsewhere knew well, per the 2020 coverage of threatened online spaces — is again facing a shutdown threat, and the question is no longer how TikTok crossed the divide but whether anything built on intermingled Chinese and Western capital, ideas, and people can survive it.
First-order effects
ByteDance faces an existential regulatory threat to its most valuable asset: US policymakers are weighing shutting down TikTok outright, putting the company's global footprint and valuation on the line.
TikTok's US user base — creators, advertisers, and the audience itself — confronts the possible loss of the dominant short-video platform, a disruption of the attention market it currently leads.
Second-order effects
ByteDance's governance is being forced to adapt: after directly managing the 2020 ban fight itself, it has shifted to letting the US TikTok team lead the response, effectively decentralizing political defense to the jurisdiction under attack.
Rival platforms and would-be acquirers gain leverage — every escalation raises the odds of a forced divestiture or wind-down that redistributes TikTok's users, creators, and ad spend to competitors.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, the era of Chinese consumer apps operating globally on shared capital and talent closes, pushing the internet toward bifurcated spheres where corporate structure must match geopolitical alignment.
The TikTok fight is becoming the template case regulators reach for when deciding whether national-security review should govern any foreign-owned platform at scale — the thoughtful cross-border regulatory model some argued for in the 2020 debate over regulating big tech remains unwritten.
The trend: Consumer internet platforms built on intermingled US-China capital and people are being forced to choose sides, with TikTok the clearest test of whether a globally adopted Chinese-owned app can exist at all.
NYT says it's difficult to imagine another Chinese company having the success of TikTok in the US. Well, it might have been Huawei, but the US government put a stop to that! “Free trade”, unless it doesn't benefit US companies. https://twitter.com/...
“Despite decades of trying, no Chinese company has ever conquered American society like TikTok. It's difficult to imagine a Russian or Iranian company...pulling off a similar feat.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
All social media platforms have the inevitable risk of being swallowed by the security and intelligence organizations of the country in which they operate and store data. TikTok has the same risk, but so does/did Meta and Twitter et al. for more than a decade. https://twitter.com…
On the cover of this week's Magazine: Alex Palmer on the story of TikTok, an app born in a very different era of U.S.-China relations that has become ensnared in the beginnings of a new one. https://www.nytimes.com/...
If you're worried about government interference on TikTok, it isn't the Chinese government you should be worried about. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
TikTok's extraordinary success is made even more remarkable by the fact that it is a product of America's greatest geopolitical rival. In a fraught geopolitical context, TikTok is considered a Trojan horse — for Chinese influence, for spying, or both. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Fantastic feature by alex palmer in the times magazine telling the arc of tiktok in America Really well written and captures the story in all its complexity https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Last year, TikTok had more site visits than Google, and more watch minutes in the United States than YouTube. Facebook took almost nine years to reach one billion users; TikTok did it in five.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
What often goes unnoticed in these conversations is that TikTok is as much a product of the West as it is of China. ByteDance owes its very existence to the intermingling of ideas, capital and people that defined the last 5 decades of US-China engagement. https://www.nytimes.com/…
TikTok proposes new transparency efforts to clinch U.S. security deal “Oracle will review app code, which determine the look and feel of TikTok AND server code, which provide functions such as search and recommendations, according to sources” https://www.reuters.com/...
$ORCL TikTok is redoubling efforts to strike a deal w/the US gov't that would placate security concerns and allow it to continue operating (TikTok is offering to give Oracle a larger role in storing data and reviewing the firm's underlying code) https://www.reuters.com/...
TIKTOK'S LATEST PROPOSAL TO U.S. GOVERNMENT FOR A SECURITY DEAL INCLUDES INDEPENDENT BOARD TO OVERSEE ITS DATA SECURITY OPERATIONS -SOURCES TIKTOK'S PROPOSED U.S. SECURITY DEAL INCLUDES ROLE FOR ORACLE CORP TO REVIEW ITS CODES, RATHER THAN JUST STORE DATA -SOURCES