Pattern Matching
TikTok Can’t Stay Out of Trouble
There’s no such thing as an apolitical social platform
Welcome back to Pattern Matching, OneZero’s weekly newsletter that puts the week’s most compelling tech stories in context.
When the Chinese tech startup ByteDance bought the lip-syncing app Musical.ly for about $1 billion in 2017, the move registered little more than a blip on the U.S. tech news scene. The app was wildly popular, but almost exclusively with teens, and the acquisition didn’t seem particularly noteworthy in a geopolitical sense.
By 2019, the app — having rebranded in fall 2018 as TikTok — was starting to gain mainstream attention as a refreshingly fun and seemingly apolitical counterpoint to scandal-plagued Facebook and taunt-ridden, bot-infested Twitter, whose executives were by then making regular trips to Washington, D.C., to testify on their role in undermining democracy. It was still mostly kids doing funny dance videos, but now the New York Times and New Yorker were paying attention. (Both of those links lead to fascinating profiles of the platform and its viral dynamics, if you’re interested.)
There is an intuitive appeal in the idea of a “neutral” social media platform — one that applies a coherent set of rules to all of its users without…
