Let’s play connect the dots. Drawing lines between recent events reveals worrying developments and an increasingly salient threat, one we’re not prepared to address.
Start with TikTok. Since its launch in 2016, it has become one of the world’s most popular social-media platforms. By 2019, there were more than 1.5 billion downloads and more than 1 billion active users in 2021. In the United States, there are at least 150 million active users. In Japan, about 25% of the population used the app in 2021, more than twice the number in 2018. Of those, more than 62% of teenagers were users, the highest among all age groups.
TikTok has been in the headlines a lot lately. Last week it was a punching bag for the U.S. Congress, as both parties spent more than five hours hammering CEO Shou Chew, insisting that his company posed a national security threat.