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Black box

Congress had made it illegal “to distribute, maintain, or update … a foreign adversary controlled application.” TikTok is incorporated in California, where it has its main office; ByteDance was founded in China but is now incorporated in the Cayman Islands, with its leadership based in Singapore and America. Per TikTok’s court filings, ByteDance’s Chinese founder currently holds 21 percent of its stock. Since ByteDance has refused to sell, TikTok is now technically illegal in the United States, though President Donald Trump has ordered a 75-day reprieve on the ban against it to give ByteDance a last opportunity to sell to non-Chinese owners.

The U.S. government claims in its submissions to the courts that Beijing might use TikTok to harvest personal information of American users, and that TikTok might manipulate the content on its platform to suit the interests of the People’s Republic of China. TikTok rejects those claims. But China does require Communist Party secretaries for any large Chinese company, and TikTok has its party representative on the management team.

What’s more, the U.S. government says it has evidence pertaining to TikTok’s malfeasance, though it is not willing to share that evidence publicly. The Supreme Court said it based its ruling entirely on what’s on the public record, but as Justice Neil M. Gorsuch noted, “Efforts to inject secret evidence into judicial proceedings present obvious constitutional concerns.”

The whole situation is hard to parse. What do we know about China’s influence over TikTok?

Emile Dirks is an associate researcher with the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Dirks says TikTok is mysterious, something whose inner workings remain obscure to outsiders. The best research on it is tentative, but hasn’t found direct evidence of TikTok censoring content in the way Chinese social-media platforms do. But the risk of it being manipulated by the Chinese Communist Party is real. Still, Dirks says, the deeper controversy over TikTok isn’t about censorship; it’s about the clash between the United States and China for primacy over the internet—at a time when the internet is, more and more, shaping the two powers’ societies and complicating their interests …

• “There’s a Chinese version of the app called Douyin that’s also owned by ByteDance. And the best research we have that compares the two hasn’t found indications that TikTok engages in the kind of content moderation you’d find on Douyin or other China-based social-media platforms. Anecdotally, we know there’s lots of content on TikTok that’s very critical of the Chinese Communist Party. Still, it’s possible that TikTok engages in subtle kinds of content moderation. I’d say the research on that is inconclusive.”
• “It’s not very difficult for malign actors, whether in China or the United States, to get their hands on the kind of user data TikTok collects—but here, too, the problem isn’t the vulnerability of user data from TikTok but from it and any number of other social-media applications. Authorities could get that data through law-enforcement requests or simply by buying it. Data brokers often buy the information social-media companies collect on their users—and then these brokers sell it on to someone else.”
• “Chinese politics can be about as opaque as social-media platforms are. We can never be sure what’s going on inside the leadership compound in Beijing. It is clear, though, that like the leadership in Washington, they want to exert dominance in the sphere of advanced technologies, including social-media platforms. Part of the way Beijing has advanced this interest is to have put export controls on their social-media companies, which means ByteDance can’t sell the algorithm that makes TikTok so popular.”

There might be several reason. America itself is getting older: In 1980, the average age was 30; today it’s above 38. And older vote at far higher rates than the young. What’s more, running for office takes time and money, which the old typically have and the young typically don’t. Nevertheless, Congress sometimes gets marginally younger.

But as Kevin Munger explores in Generation Gap: Why the Baby Boomers Still Dominate American Politics and Culture, America’s gerontocracy is also a product of the country’s political institutions. European populations have gotten older too, but their political leaders have stayed relatively spry. That, says Munger, is partly because they have proportional representation, which means youthful insurgent parties can credibly contest elections. In the U.S., though, the old guard has its hands on the two parties—and longtime incumbents, if they manage to ward off unknown and underfunded challengers in the primaries, can then breeze to victory in safe seats.

—Gustav Jönsson

• A special court in Pakistan has sentenced Imran Khan, the country’s former prime minister, to 14 years in prison for an allegedly corrupt land deal. Since the country’s powerful military toppled him in 2022, Khan has been charged with more than 100 crimes including murder, terrorism, illegal marriage, and breaching national security: “Khan, who remains the country’s most popular political figure, has maintained that the cases against him are part of a ‘political witch hunt’ to keep him out of power.”
• After recent spells of acute drought, the Greek parliament is considering a bill that would make it easier for coastal hotels to pump seawater into their swimming pools. Deputy Minister of Tourism Elena Rapti says, “The focus, of course, is to conserve water resources.”
• Engulfed in volcanic ash nearly 2,000 years ago, excavations in Pompeii continue to reveal a picture of life in the ancient city. “It’s like a puzzle,” says Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the Pompeii Archaeological Park. “Every piece is important.”

• Struggle to find new, off-the-beaten-path websites that are actually delightful or useful? Internet is Beautiful is a great resource—curating hidden gems, new products, and valuable tools that AI and search dominated by sponsored results don’t send your way. Sign up here.

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