U.S. lawmakers have said that they are moving forward with a plan to ban TikTok, one of the most popular apps in the world. In hearings last week, Congress questioned TikTok’s C.E.O., Shou Zi Chew, about the platform’s addictive algorithm, its content, and whether it shares user data with the Chinese government. The hearings bore a resemblance to the questioning of Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook in 2018—not least because of the representatives’ incomprehension of how the technology works. This déjà vu raises questions: Why hasn’t anything been done to protect Americans’ data privacy? And is a ban the only way? Kyle Chayka, who wrote about Chew and his critics at the hearings, joins Tyler Foggatt for a conversation about what separates the real dangers of TikTok from alarmism and xenophobia.
Related - Episodes
Jiayang Fan immigrated to the United States from China at age seven. Her mother, who had been a doctor, cleaned houses in Greenwich, Connecticut, so that Fan could attend good schools. In 2011, Fan’s mother was diagnosed with A.L.S., and Fan oversaw…
Supposedly, things in Hollywood have been changing for women and people of color. After the #MeToo, #OscarsSoWhite, and Black Lives Matter movements, leaders in the entertainment industry promised a lot: new kinds of stories were going to be told, by…
One of the most read New Yorker stories of 2023 was Ronan Farrow’s investigation into Elon Musk—how the U.S. government came to rely on him, and why it’s now struggling to rein him in. With Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter (now…
