Week of Dec. 26, 2024

From the editor’s desk

TikTok’s days may be numbered. If its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, does not sell the wildly popular platform to a U.S.-approved buyer by Jan. 19, its distribution via the Apple App Store and Google Play Store could become illegal.

Here’s a summary of the concerns driving the proposed ban from The New York Times: 

Lawmakers and regulators in the West have increasingly expressed concern that TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance, may put sensitive user data, like location information, into the hands of the Chinese government. They have pointed to laws that allow the Chinese government to secretly demand data from Chinese companies and citizens for intelligence-gathering operations.

They are also worried that China could use TikTok’s content recommendations to fuel misinformation, a concern that has escalated in the United States during the Israeli-Hamas war and the presidential election. Critics say TikTok has fueled the spread of antisemitism.

Alternatively, it’s possible that when the Supreme Court reviews TikTok’s appeal, which is scheduled to happen on Jan. 10, 2025, the pending ban could be halted.

As we wait to find out, the Pew Research Center has distributed some illuminating stats on the demographic makeup of TikTok influencers, as compared with those of Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter) and YouTube influencers. (An “influencer,” for the sake of this study, is defined as a user with more than 100,000 followers who posted regularly about news in early 2024.)

Gender: TikTok has the smallest gender gap: 50% of news influencers on TikTok are men, while 45% are women. On all other sites, men outnumber women by a roughly two-to-one margin or more.

Political orientation: TikTok also stands out as the only site of the five where news influencers who explicitly identify as right-leaning (25% of TikTok news influencers) do not outnumber those who publicly express a left-leaning political ideology (28%).

Values and identities: News influencers on TikTok are more likely than those on other sites to show support for LGBTQ+ rights or identify as LGBTQ+ in their account profiles (13%).

Good to know.

Take care,

—Kris Vagner, managing editor