“Information Looking for People”
A review of Emily Baker-White, “Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok” (Norton, 2025).
In 2022, journalist Emily Baker-White published articles in BuzzFeed News casting doubt on claims by TikTok that the short-form video platform was insulating personal data of its American users from the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, and from the Chinese government. Her reporting landed as members of Congress and officials in the Biden administration were alleging that TikTok could be manipulated by Beijing to surveil Americans, censor criticism of China, and spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda.
Predictably, ByteDance and TikTok denigrated Baker-White’s work. Then, the journalist’s further digging, combined with whistleblower leaks, revealed that ByteDance had unleashed internal corporate sleuths to do precisely what its representatives had sworn under oath in congressional testimony that the company would not—and could not—do: They had used Baker-White’s TikTok account to track her movements and communication, both online and in the real world. It emerged that ByteDance also had targeted a British journalist with the Financial Times.
Caught dead to rights, ByteDance eventually apologized, fired a handful of employees, and promised to mend its ways.
Now Baker-White, who currently writes for Forbes, has published an account of the rise of the Chinese social media behemoth. “Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok” describes an innovative, influential, consistently deceitful, and hugely successful corporate juggernaut. TikTok has defied attempts to rein it in and morphed into a digital force that remains available as a tool of manipulation—and not just by the Chinese regime. Embraced by President Trump and some of his most prominent billionaire allies, TikTok has morphed into a key component of a burgeoning MAGA-friendly cultural-information complex that also includes the Ellison family’s database management company, Oracle; its expanding Hollywood conglomerate, Skydance Media; Skydance-owned CBS News; and Elon Musk’s X, a social media platform popular among right-wing influencers and trolls.
Since January, when Trump himself brokered a new ownership structure for TikTok spearheaded by his backer Larry Ellison, Oracle’s co-founder and executive chairman, there is evidence that TikTok is blocking content critical of the White House’s aggressive anti-immigrant policies and related to the president’s former friend, the late pedophile sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. As Evan Greer, director of the progressive tech group Fight for the Future, told Politico recently: “We’ve seen the platform [TikTok] transfer from one set of owners, where there was one set of concerns about propaganda and privacy, to a new set of owners, where now there’s a new set of concerns about propaganda and privacy.”
But while Baker-White’s book, published in late 2025, doesn’t take into account the Trump-orchestrated ownership shuffle, her description of TikTok’s inextricable Chinese DNA underscores that the threat of exploitation by Beijing continues, even as it coexists with the likelihood that the platform is now seeking to appease the Trump White House. ByteDance retains a 19.9 percent stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations. Oracle, the American private equity firm Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX each own a 15 percent stake, with the remaining shares divided among several other firms.
An Author’s Mild Reaction to Her Own Troubling Findings
“Every Screen on the Planet” is a useful but odd book. Thoroughly reported, it chronicles the hypocrisy and lies that seem endemic in the tech industry and which I’ve written about extensively for Lawfare and other outlets. But in spite of the sordid record she has assembled, Baker-White is perplexingly sympathetic to the interrelated social media companies she describes and to most of the entrepreneurs and executives who populate her pages. The author does not attempt to reconcile the tension between her troubling factual findings and her mild reaction to them.
One reason for the disconnect may be Baker-White’s fascination with the technological innovation behind TikTok’s legendary algorithm—the software that selects which videos to serve up to users based on preferences revealed by their past online behavior. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, a computer engineer intrigued by human psychology, built an algorithm that delivered content reflecting not the familial and friendship networks that initially powered apps such as Facebook, but predictions of what would entertain users. This marked a shift from platforms designed to serve, in Yiming’s words, “people looking for information” to one facilitating “information looking for people.” (
On various ByteDance apps in China that preceded TikTok, the information looking for people ranged from pictures of cute girls to yummy food. TikTok, ByteDance’s main foray into the U.S. market in 2018, gained traction with brief videos of teen and tween girls lip-synching and dancing along with their favorite pop tunes. On its way to 100 million and then 200 million U.S. users over the next several years, TikTok expanded its fare to include makeup tutorials, celebrity gossip, fashion trends, conspiracy theories, and some talk-into-the-iPhone about culture, commerce, and politics.
Baker-White seems in awe of TikTok’s algorithm, claiming it can “identify our desires better than we c[an].” It offers, she writes, “pure delight” arrayed in an infinite scroll of eye-catching imagery. If your desires run to solipsistic lip-synching of K-pop hits, you will indeed be delighted. In any event, it’s indisputable that a lot of people love TikTok. Facebook, Instagram, and other rival apps have hastened to build their own recommendation engines designed to please users who passively await the information looking for them and, not incidentally, the accompanying advertisements that made Yiming a billionaire many times over.
Dishonesty Woven Into the Corporate Culture
The trouble with ByteDance and TikTok, however, goes beyond the dubious quality of the entertainment they emit. From the start, Yiming and his colleagues employed deception to establish their brand, according to Baker-White. They used false accounts and surreptitiously generated engagement to entice new users and tempt popular content creators to defect from other platforms. On more serious matters, they lied publicly about the degree to which ByteDance employees in China retained access to U.S. users’ private information.
Dishonesty was woven into the corporate culture. So was a willingness to comply with Chinese government mandates to censor criticism of Beijing’s political and ethnic repression. Videos of Tiananmen Square disappeared, as did material documenting human rights violations against the minority Muslim Uyghur population.
Having provided examples of all of these practices, Baker-White strangely shrugs them off. Repeatedly, she argues that Yiming found himself in an “impossible” position when faced with demands from Chinese government or Communist officials that his company tow the party line.
What the author fails to grapple with is that no one forced Yiming or the thousands of people who have worked for him to devote their energy and time to developing mass communication technology optimized to disseminate low-grade entertainment and sensational disinformation. They could have devised, say, better cancer-screening software or more energy-efficient batteries to reduce climate change. And having decided instead to build ad-driven social media apps, no one forced them to market their products in the U.S. and then, when confronted with all-but-inevitable questions about free speech and surveillance, to lie about whether the Chinese parent company would impose the home country’s autocratic tendencies on the American market.
“TikTok Effectively Was ByteDance”
Baker-White devotes many pages to the “war” of her title, which turns out to be the struggle from 2020 through 2025 between an array of U.S. government officials and regulators, on one side, and TikTok’s executives and lobbyists on the other. Seeking to avoid U.S. government pressure to divest TikTok, with the threat of an outright ban in the background, ByteDance proposed an evolving series of technological and bureaucratic solutions aimed at shielding American users’ accounts from the Chinese government. With a range of motivations, Republicans and Democrats, including officials from the first Trump and Biden administrations, didn’t buy the supposed protections. The reason was simple. As Baker-White’s own reporting showed, TikTok and ByteDance were one and the same: “TikTok effectively was ByteDance …. [T]he companies had tried to present themselves as separate, but there was little meaningful distinction between them.”
Despite a lavishly funded lobbying campaign opposing forced divestment, Biden signed legislation during the waning days of his administration that required ByteDance to spin off TikTok or face a ban. The clock ran out on Biden as a lame duck, but Trump, earlier a TikTok critic, flipped his position, brazenly defied the congressional mandate, and came to the platform’s rescue.
Baker-White tells the story of Trump’s flip-flop skillfully, beginning with his ire when an army of K-pop fans used the app to troll him during the 2020 presidential campaign. Four years later, he realized that helping TikTok would harm Mark Zuckerberg, who for a time Trump perceived as an enemy. Baker-White points out that at a crucial moment in 2024, Trump met privately with billionaire Republican donor Jeffrey Yass, who just happened to be a major investor in ByteDance. Through representatives, the two men claimed they didn’t discuss TikTok’s fate.
However Trump got there, he’s now a gushing TikTok fan. On his own social media site, Truth Social, he recently expressed his hope that TikTok, under its new ownership structure, would help ensure the backing of young voters: “I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok!” he wrote in late January. “It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice. Along with other factors, it was responsible for my doing so well with the Youth Vote in the 2024 Presidential Election. I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”
As a coda, Trump added: “I would also like to thank President Xi, of China, for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal. He could have gone the other way, but didn’t, and is appreciated for his decision.” The degree to which the Chinese government will continue to exert influence over TikTok, while the platform simultaneously excludes content based on its apparent potential to offend President Trump, remains to be seen.
Allegations of Addictiveness
Meanwhile, another threat to TikTok and rival social media platforms is taking shape in U.S. courtrooms and before regulators in Europe.
In her biggest misstep, Baker-White casually dismisses concerns that essential design features of TikTok and other attention-grabbing apps harm young users. “Clearly, the web has put some kids at risk, exposing them to predators, drugs, and self-harm,” she acknowledges. “It has also clearly helped other kids survive through abuse, helping them find supportive communities that they lack at home.” The author’s cynical takeaway is that inquiries into whether heavy TikTok use might not be good for children only works to the company’s advantage because its platform is no worse than other social media venues.
There is a legitimate debate about what social science tells us about whether, on average, children’s mental health deteriorates if they spend hours a day on social media. But there’s not much serious debate about whether at least a significant minority of young users—millions and millions of children in the U.S. and around the world—suffer some kind of harm on social media platforms. Classmates bully them. Groomers manipulate them. “Sextortion” schemes ensnare them. Bizarre body-shaming messages lead to eating disorders and self-injury. Incessant notifications disrupt learning and sleep.
Baker-White, and the tech industry spokespeople she echoes, are disingenuous to attribute these dangers to “the web,” as if the entire internet is to blame. The focus here is social media, a fabulously profitable, largely unregulated subset of activity on the internet, where corporations employ extensive teams dedicated to maximizing the amount of time all users, including young users, spend on the platforms. It is equally disingenuous to suggest that supportive communities some young people find online would disappear if the negative aspects of the platforms were modified or eliminated. The goals of boosting the positive uses of social media while curbing its deleterious side effects are not only not mutually exclusive; they can be consistent.
As I write this, a pioneering civil trial is unfolding in a state court in Los Angeles, pitting plaintiffs alleging that social media companies deliberately addict young people against Meta, owner of Instagram and Facebook, and Google, owner of YouTube. Both companies deny wrongdoing. TikTok and Snap, which were also named as defendants in the suit, have already agreed to confidential settlements without admitting liability.
Dozens of similar cases have been filed in courtrooms around the country. The common issue is not whether the platforms can be held liable for particular content; the defendants enjoy considerable protection from such liability under a federal statute known as Section 230. Instead, the issue is whether the fundamental design—the architecture—of the platforms, including their recommendation algorithms, are meant to be addictive, akin to digital slot machines or even cigarettes.
In Europe, regulators have already made up their minds on this question, at least with regard to TikTok. In early February, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, issued a preliminary decision that TikTok’s “infinite scroll,” auto-play features, and recommendation algorithm amount to an “addictive design,” which violates EU law on online safety. The Europeans ordered TikTok to overhaul the features that have made it so popular, or risk multibillion-euro fines under the Digital Services Act. TikTok vowed appeals, calling the findings “categorically false and entirely meritless.”
Based on the reflexive corporate dishonesty portrayed throughout “Every Screen on the Planet,” it is difficult to take TikTok’s indignation seriously.
