Every generation is the title of a song and because it is generic to everyone the words are true from the 1980s when it was written and sung. The song talks about how every generation relates to movies often more than twice. Now days we might change movies to social media, because what social media you use often describes your age or generation. For younger people who have grown up with the smartphone there is an app for that. That suggests there are many apps for people to use and more importantly, it takes something special to break out and become widely used. One app that is very popular is TikTok..

Emily Baker-White wrote a book called The War over TikTok – every screen on the planet, published by W. W. Norton & Company, NY 2025.

Zhang Yiming, founder of a company called ByteDance, fueled by a central algorithm that profiled users, determined their interests and fed them news and entertainment that it thought they would like. It’s secret sauce was attention, if an app could hold users’ focus for long enough, it could track their decisions and actions and use those decisions and actions to predict what they wanted to see next, before they knew to look for it.

ByteDance, would build an app called TikTok: a frictionless feed of short, entertaining vides trained meticulously on people’s interests, personalities, and senses of humor. The company was founded in 2012, by 2021, TikTok would overtake Google as the most visited website in the world, by 2024 it had more than a billion users.

As a business, ByteDance was an extraordinary success.

The issue outside of China, is in China the government tries very hard not to let opposition to whatever it is doing to come to the forefront. They have cybersecurity people monitoring apps in China to ensure whatever position the government has, few words and videos are allowed to be aired. If companies allow too much, the government has and will take actions including shutting down the app.

In the US, you can read whatever you want into the above statement, an app that is based in China may or may not be helping the Chinese government. The algorithms can pinpoint opposition and they can take action. In the US, the data is supposed to be used as a block, not pinpoint individually.

The people who worry about cybersecurity started to worry about TikTok and the book is about the legal journey and ways TikTok tried to allow control in China, but outside of China to be less controlling and allow people to have joy while watching the videos.

In the end, all apps end up trying to monetize themselves because in 2020, businesses spent more than $75 billion on Chinese ads in China. In the US, businesses spent $130 billion on digital ads.

The book is about how the cybersecurity people were alarmed with what information the Chinese could or possibly could collect, what ByteDance did to try to lessen their concerns such as moving their headquarters from China to Singapore, but emails were found that Chinese regulators had a say. The US government considered seriously shutting down TikTok but President Trump was the wildcard. Trump represented neither the conservative or liberal position. He was an island, with the position: TikTok is good because TikTok is good for me.

As President, he has advocated TikTok’s US operations be sold to a group led by Oracle, Silver Lake Partners, and Aubi Dhabi based MGX now control 80.1%, while ByteDance owns 19.9%. The US operations use Oracle’s data centers.

Linking to dividend paying stocks, the difference between the administrations of President Biden and President Trump is under Biden, Congress and Cybersecurity experts controlled the narrative. Under President Trump, the company has to pander to Trump so he is not personally affected, as long as he is neutral, companies can do what they need to do. Learning to be responsive to government is what executives must do.

There are more questions than answers, till next time – to raising questions.