Whatever deal the US president is eyeing over the app, it is further proof some digital giants wield disproportionate clout<\/p>\n
Late on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US<\/a>. This was not because of a power outage, but because its owner switched it off. For an explanation of why it did so, though, we have to spool back a bit. For years, TikTok has been a thorn in the sides of US legislators and national security officials for two reasons. First, it\u2019s owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which doubtless does whatever Xi Jinping tells it to do. Second, TikTok hoovers up phenomenally detailed data about its young users. The average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is about 25 seconds. \u201cThat\u2019s 26 \u2018episodes\u2019 per session,\u201d says blogger Prof Scott Galloway<\/a>, \u201cwith each episode generating multiple microsignals: whether you scrolled past a video, paused it, rewatched it, liked it, commented on it, shared it, and followed the creator, plus how long you watched before moving on. That\u2019s hundreds of signals. Sweet crude like the world has never seen, ready to be algorithmically refined into rocket fuel.\u201d The thought of personal data with this granularity falling into Chinese hands seemingly drove the American deep state, not to mention Meta, Google and co wild. And Congress got the message.<\/p>\n In April last year, Joe Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act<\/a>, a statute that had attracted unprecedented bipartisan support on its path through a divided Congress. The act basically mandated that TikTok\u2019s owner would have to sell it to an American company or be banned in the US. It was scheduled to come into force on Sunday 19 January 2025.<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Whatever deal the US president is eyeing over the app, it is further proof some digital giants wield disproportionate clout Late on Saturday 18 January, TikTok, the short-video app beloved of millions of users mostly aged between 18 and 24, went dark in the US. This was not because of a power outage, but because … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31559"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31559\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}