TikTok was never meant to be a geopolitical pawn. It originated from the merger of two apps: ByteDance’s TikTok (launched in China as Douyin in 2016) and Musical.ly, a lip-syncing video platform popular in the West. ByteDance acquired Musical.ly in November 2017 for an undisclosed amount reported to be between $800 million and $1 billion, and merged it into TikTok in August 2018, consolidating all accounts and users under the TikTok brand. Alex Zhu, an eccentric Chinese entrepreneur who founded Musical.ly before becoming an executive at TikTok, told the German magazine Der Spiegel in early 2020, ‘we shouldn’t force the whole city to become a public square’. Entertainment, not politics, was its game.

A lot has changed since then. TikTok has become one of the most downloaded apps ever. When the world locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic, people sought out entertainment. Many, especially the young, turned to TikTok en masse. Users stuck around, so much so that today more than 1.5 billion people use the app regularly. My own reporting suggests that one in three Brits use TikTok. The app’s popularity has led to political interest. Donald Trump made it part of his trade negotiations with China, to the extent that its future in the United States remains uncertain. Trump and anti-China hawks see the app as a deep-state plot to try and upend Western cultural and societal values; China sees it as a useful rejoinder to US dominance of the tech sphere worldwide.

Emily Baker-White, a former lawyer turned journalist, has been covering TikTok’s rise for some years now, often using insider access. Her scoops have repeatedly embarrassed the company, which has spent much of the last five years trying to convince the West that it isn’t a threat. Some of Baker-White’s reporting