What Happens When Americans Join the Global Internet

For people who spend a lot of time on TikTok, the last few months have been surreal: a president with no presence on the platform has been agitating to ban it on the basis of national security. (TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company.) In contrast to mounting political criticisms of, say, Facebook and Twitter, platforms where the president is extremely active and invested, the government’s public case against TikTok has been largely speculative, citing theoretical dangers and hardly trying to appeal to the app’s users directly. It’s no surprise that the vague message from TikTok’s interim global head, Vanessa Pappas, gave some users comfort, given how little this process has addressed them. TikTok’s users are experiencing for the first time something long familiar to much of the world outside the United States: a flourishing online social space existentially threatened by diplomatic and political fights between states and corporations, with little input from those affected by their decisions.