TikTok is not just the most downloaded app in the world; it’s the most powerful information platform on the planet.

The app is also a political flashpoint. TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company under the shadow of Beijing. For years, US lawmakers have tried to rein it in, either by banning it outright or forcing a sale to American investors. Now, with Donald Trump back in office, that fight has entered a new phase that could reshape the social media landscape. Last week, Trump signed an executive order approving the creation of a new entity — TikTok US — that would allow the app to remain available in America despite the “ban” that Congress passed in 2024. Trump’s allies — Larry Ellison (the CEO of Oracle), Michael Dell (of Dell Technologies), and the Murdochs — will reportedly be involved in running the new company. China still has to approve the deal.

Emily Baker-White is a senior writer at Forbes and the author of Every Screen on the Planet: The War Over TikTok. Her reporting exposed how ByteDance employees accessed American users’ data and how TikTok’s internal systems gave the company enormous influence over what we see.

I invited Baker-White onto The Gray Area to talk about the latest news in the potential US-China TikTok deal, how Washington and Beijing are playing this game, and why the app has become a cultural superpower. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

TikTok isn’t just another social platform. Why is it so addictive?

TikTok’s founder, Zhang Yiming, believed information could find people better than people could find information. On older platforms, you followed accounts and searched for things. On TikTok, you open the app and it just goes. It watches how long you linger, how you interact, and the experience is so frictionless that it figures you out while you do nothing.

And it’s designed to take away agency — it feeds you what you’ll want without you asking.

Exactly. And it’s sneaky because we like it. If we didn’t, we wouldn’t use it. We’re giving up agency without noticing, because the product is pleasant.

Is part of the pleasure not having to think?

Decision fatigue is real. You didn’t used to have to do anything in the checkout line. You could just stand there and be a person waiting your turn. Now you can’t just, you know, raw dog the checkout line. When did that become intolerable? When did we have to be doing something in every tiny pause of........

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